A 138-year-old company headquartered in Concord, Massachusetts, Welch Foods, Inc., is the food processing and marketing arm of The National Grape Cooperative Association, Inc., a grower-owned agricultural cooperative. Welch’s is the world’s leading producer of juices, jams and jellies made from Concord and Niagara grapes. The company has 1,200 employees and a number of processing plants and offices across the United States.

The Challenge: Securely Delivering Oracle to Brokers and Co-manufacturers

Welch’s originally implemented Citrix Presentation Server™ for application delivery to remote employees. However, when the company embarked on a four-year project to replace its existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution with Oracle’s E-Business 11i Web application suite, it became clear that an expanded application delivery solution was needed.

“Our vision was to enable our 250 external brokers and co-manufacturers to work directly with the Oracle system to put in an order, get a packing list or print an invoice,” explained George Scangas, IT infrastructure manager. “We were concerned about data security and also efficiency, since we have a very small infrastructure staff of three. We wanted to avoid having to create VPN tunnels for all these users or having to publish Oracle externally.”

Welch’s IT staff also wanted to ensure exceptionally high availability, speed and reliability of the Oracle suite. The company was looking for a replacement to its outdated server load-balancing solution that could offer compression, caching, TCP offload and other sophisticated optimization technologies.

Implementing a Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure Solution

Welch’s upgraded to Citrix Presentation Server, Platinum Edition with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 on three Dell servers to deliver a number of applications, including business intelligence, call center and sales forecasting software, to employees at headquarters and remote locations.

To load-balance its four Web servers running the Oracle E-Business application, the IT team considered three different solutions, including Citrix® NetScaler®, Enterprise Edition. Scangas said, “NetScaler was the best solution because it integrates nicely with the new Presentation Server farm. The way it’s licensed and put together is far superior to the competition.” Welch’s also valued the SSL VPN functionality of Citrix Access Gateway™ that is integrated with NetScaler as an optional module.

Working with DeVa Systems Group, a Platinum Citrix® Solution Advisor, Welch’s implemented four NetScaler appliances to load-balance the Oracle application servers. Two appliances sit in the DMZ to handle external traffic coming in via the SSL VPN, and two sit on the LAN to handle traffic from users at Welch’s processing plants, which comes in on a private MPLS network. The NetScaler appliances are also used to load-balance Welch’s other Web applications, including its intranet portal.

The granularity and flexibility of the NetScaler solution helped Scangas and his team quickly optimize performance with Oracle. He explained, “NetScaler was caching some objects Oracle didn’t like. We were able to put in a special expression to bypass those features.”

Streamlining Secure Application Delivery to External Business Partners

Previously, Welch’s brokers and co-manufacturers had to use a clumsy, paper-based process to obtain information from the legacy ERP system. “We used to print out information and fax it to them,” recalled Scangas. “Faxes would get lost, and of course, any manual system takes a long time. We wanted them to be able to access the Oracle system directly to speed up business processes, get rid of duplication and improve accuracy. Citrix’s load-balancing and optimization technology gives our brokers and co-manufacturers high-performance, high-availability access to Oracle. Citrix also protects our corporate network with end-to-end security.”

Citrix enables the three-person team to manage this influx of new users without requiring additional staff. “We considered setting up VPN tunnels to connect all the different broker and co-manufacturer locations with the Oracle system, but it would have been a nightmare and very expensive. Citrix SSL VPN technology provides a high level of security without all that cost and complexity.”

Improving Performance

From the beginning, Welch’s has benefited from improved application performance with Citrix Presentation Server. Scangas said, “Our sales team in Arkansas uses an application called Shiloh to do business with Wal-Mart. Formerly, we had to have a client/server architecture between the Arkansas office and Concord, and it was very slow. When we published Shiloh using Citrix, it sped things up considerably.”

Now the new Citrix solution is delivering additional benefits. “The Citrix Presentation Server farm is providing up to a 50-percent improvement in performance over our old farm,” he said. “And the NetScaler solution is optimizing performance of Web applications through compression and caching technology. For example, people at remote sites are commenting that their portal pages are loading much faster.”

To monitor application performance, the IT team will implement the application performance monitoring capability included in Presentation Server, Platinum Edition. “Our old farm experienced issues such as session disconnections and we had no visibility to actual user experience. Nor did we have a baseline of performance metrics from which to derive system health and availability. We’re planning to begin proactively monitoring performance and troubleshooting issues from the datacenter.”

Simplifying Licensing

According to Scangas, one of the impressive features of Citrix NetScaler is its simple licensing. “With the competitive solutions we considered, if I needed extra functionality I would not only have to get the right license, but also upgrade the hardware and install a special module. There was no way I could figure it out because there were so many different variables. With NetScaler, I get everything with one license, and if I need an upgrade I just purchase a license for it — no hardware changes.”

He concluded, “Our number-one project is implementing the Oracle ERP and giving brokers and co-manufacturers secure access to the system. Citrix NetScaler with the integrated SSL VPN functionality was the best solution for delivering Oracle with reliability, speed and cost-effectiveness.”

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