New Delhi Television Limited (NDTV) is India’s first and largest private producer of news, current affairs and entertainment television. NDTV has 23 offices and studios across the country and hosts India’s most modern and sophisticated production and news gathering facilities. In India, NDTV 24X7, the flagship English news channel,  is the market leader. NDTV India, the company’s 24-hour Hindi news channel, is respected for its integrity and commitment to real journalism. NDTV Profit, a 24-hour business channel, has established new standards for simple, clear and transparent reporting on the world of business. NDTV has launched its first channel outside India in partnership with Astro, a leading Southeast Asian media group.

The challenge – Seamless application delivery

As India’s pioneering and leading news television company, NDTV has maintained a consistent business growth rate for a long period. However, the demand for its channels by a growing news and current affairs audience meant that additional investments had to be made in core business applications and IT infrastructure. It also became necessary to account for competition from multiple news, current affairs and entertainment channels that launched in the last few years.

Said K. Y. Iyer, head-IT, NDTV, “Even as we were experiencing fast-paced business growth, we had to contend with a highly competitive and crowded marketplace. The primary challenge that we faced about five years ago was to publish non-Web and business-critical applications via the Internet. Users wanted applications delivered to them faster.  The key was to centralize these applications and deliver them to employees at more than 20 locations around the country. Fortunately, our incumbent IT infrastructure was not that mature, diversified or multi-locational for us to face any migration or porting challenges as such, and thus the centralization premise matched our expansion plans. While evaluating various solutions in the market, we felt that Citrix XenApp matched our strategic endeavors and would address the challenges of rapid application deployment and business expansion.”

These applications also had to be pushed beyond the main premises in New Delhi to a growing number of locations around the country—and quickly at that. Fast, on-demand access to the applications by different levels of users was becoming paramount.

Implementing an application virtualization infrastructure from Citrix

NDTV partnered with New Delhi-based PC Solutions (a Gold Citrix Solution Advisor) to implement a solution comprising Citrix® XenApp™ and Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003. Currently, about 80 users are accessing a host of applications via the Web from different locations around the country using the Web Interface capability of XenApp. Middle management professionals, workers, managers, production staff and down-the-line personnel are accessing standard Microsoft Office applications, a finance application, some specialized television broadcast station applications and a customized advertising schedules system. The users connect via leased lines and Internet connectivity is provided by Internet service providers (ISPs) such as Bharti, Spicetel, Pacific Internet and Spectranet in different regions of the country.

Speedy and centralized application delivery supports business growth

Centralized management and speedy application delivery with XenApp is playing a key role in enabling the tremendous growth of NDTV, including additional locations in state capitals across India.  Iyer attested to the all-round benefits that have been experienced since the deployment of the Citrix solution.

“While we have not set metrics in place, the cost savings from centralized application delivery to multiple locations at one stroke are immense. We have avoided a lot of heartburn about having to use manpower and resources to physically deploy these applications. Another advantage is improved security. With application processing happening on the server behind the firewall, and with user access strictly defined, our confidential information is protected.”

Fast, secure access to core applications

Timely access to applications by a host of users is critical in a highly competitive news-gathering environment. Iyer pointed out the important relationship between the 24-hour breaking news cycle of all the channels on NDTV’s platform and high availability of applications to end users.  

“There are no perceptible delays in application delivery and we have achieved higher business productivity and better end-user satisfaction. It is a question of enabling users and giving them the rights to access applications as and when they want, and we have addressed that satisfactorily with XenApp.”

IT administration is streamlined

Since the Citrix deployment coincided with a maturing IT infrastructure, there are no comparisons to scenarios in previous IT environments. However, centralized management from New Delhi has streamlined IT administration to a great extent.

Concurred Iyer, “IT administration is definitely a breeze as there is potentially only one location where my staff must go to resolve issues: the datacenter. Application rollout itself involves just one round of effort—implementation on the servers—which enables the IT team to deliver applications and services to users faster. Because we no longer have to send IT staff to different locations for application maintenance or troubleshooting, we have saved significant time and effort as well as travel costs over the long run.”

About Citrix XenApp

Citrix XenApp, a member of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, is the industry’s de facto standard for delivering Windows®-based applications with the best performance, security and cost savings. XenApp is the most complete application virtualization system available. It offers the ability to virtualize applications on both the client side and server side, delivering them on-demand based on the user, the application or the location (online or offline).

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