Starbucks Coffee Company is the leading retailer, roaster and brand of specialty coffee in the world. Starbucks opened its first coffee houses in Zurich and Vienna in 2001, and since then the company has rapidly expanded its presence in the Alpine nations with new coffee houses. At the beginning of 2007, Starbucks had grown to a total of 40 coffee houses in both countries. This swift development brought with it high IT costs, as the company grew its market presence without really looking at operating costs.

The Challenge: Efficient Management of a Complex IT Environment

“In the first couple of years, we enjoyed quite a boom,” commented Christoph Hammer, the finance and IT manager for Starbucks Switzerland and Starbucks Austria, who is based in Volketswil, Switzerland. “We were more focused on the development of the company and didn’t think to standardize on one IT platform for the whole organisation. It soon became clear that we had to do something about that.” Starbucks had to conceive a new IT strategy as the basis for short-, medium- and long-term business and IT planning. “The priority, however, still needed to be the continued growth of the company,” commented Hammer.

Implementing the Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure

Instead of continuing to plow capital into an in-house IT infrastructure, Starbucks decided to completely outsource its computing environment for Switzerland and Austria.
Following a number of discussions and site visits, Starbucks chose iSource, a Gold Citrix® Solution Advisor, as its outsourcing partner. “We felt that iSource presented the best option for the new IT platform, given both their comprehensive credentials and their extensive experience in this field.” By outsourcing its IT infrastructure using a Citrix Presentation Server™ farm, Starbucks has built the foundation for a cost-effective and efficient IT operation.

Starbucks and iSource jointly completed the project in just two months. In addition to SAP GUI, all Microsoft® Windows® applications are hosted centrally in an iSource datacenter where the Citrix Presentation Server and Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 environment are housed. About 100 Starbucks employees in Switzerland and 35 in Austria are using the new infrastructure; however the user count is increasing daily.

One of the main challenges was to ensure a smooth, seamless transition to the new infrastructure. Additionally, the new system needed to be installed in the iSource datacenter, tested extensively and finally put into production.

Subsequently, the Starbucks support center in Volketswil was integrated into the Citrix infrastructure, followed by the 30 Swiss coffee houses. In the next phase, the Austrian market was also integrated. The Swiss support center is connected to the datacenter using a 4 Mbps line; all other employees, including the Vienna support center, connect securely over the Internet using Web Interface for Citrix® Presentation Server, Secure Gateway for Citrix® Presentation Server or a VPN.

Shared Services with High Uptime

The scalable solution has enabled Starbucks to expand, as new users can connect quickly and easily to the Citrix environment. The same is true for new coffee houses that need to be connected to the centralized applications. This flexibility and scalability are essential for a company with such ambitious growth plans as Starbucks’.

The effectiveness of the off-site IT infrastructure has been increased through central data storage and the resulting data consistency. The business data is available in one place and not decentralized in the various branches. “A lot of factors come together here, and they all contribute to having iSource, through Citrix Presentation Server, being able to operate our IT system very efficiently,” Hammer reports. “The centralized Citrix platform contributes significantly to our ability to deliver custom-made services, all the while combined with an ongoing transparent billing of our services.”

In daily operations, iSource uses the Citrix management tools of Load Manager for Citrix® Presentation Server and Resource Manager for Citrix® Presentation Server. With Load Manager, administrators provide a load-related balance within the Citrix Presentation Server farm. When a user logs on, Load Manager automatically transfers him to the server with the most available resources. Resource Manager records the level of use of the various components and is thus ready for audit.

Improved Service with Reduced Costs

With a little more than six months’ experience with the outsourced IT infrastructure, Hammer can confirm, “iSource has taken up our challenge and produced an optimal infrastructure to suit our needs. The Citrix solution supports our centralized operational requirements, but also those of the individual coffee houses in Switzerland and Austria. In that way, we have been able to palpably improve the level of service we offer to our coffee houses, whilst drastically reducing local support costs. We now have an ideal basis for continued process optimization and support for our growth strategy.

“As the organisation has made this decision, we are now perfectly placed for future growth, and can be flexible in the face of any changes in the market,” Hammer concluded.

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