Desktop operations teams face one of the most difficult challenges in IT: that of deploying, managing and maintaining distributed PCs across the organisation and around the globe while trying to contain costs, keep pace with business changes and improve user productivity.

Traditional or first-generation desktop management is inherently cost- and labor-intensive, as you try to balance device support with enabling user flexibility. You need to manage every user device, installing the operating system (OS) and any OS patches individually on each device. Users add unauthorised software and, over time, your desktops no longer resemble the organisation’s corporate desktop standard. Application conflicts and system crashes are common.

Desktop maintenance also comes with a hefty price tag. Industry studies indicate that traditional desktop management costs an average of US$5,000 (€3600) per employee per year. For a company of 5,000 employees, that translates to US$25 million (€18 million) per year just to provide a standard desktop to its employees.

Citrix developed XenDesktop™ to dramatically lower the cost and increase the efficiency of desktop management. XenDesktop simplifies desktop management by centralising desktops in the datacentre, and delivering them to users on demand. This drastically reduces device maintenance requirements because OS, patch and compatibility issues are resolved once in the datacentre, not individually on every device. XenDesktop avoids the massive storage and limited scaleability issues of other solutions by maintaining a single golden image of the OS rather than separate, fully loaded images for each employee.

When a user logs on, XenDesktop dynamically assembles the user’s preferences and the operating system, and delivers a new, pristine, up-to-date desktop to the user. This  dynamic assembly reduces datacentre energy consumption by up to 40 percent, datacentre storage by up to 90 percent and overall total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 40 percent, while eliminating conflicts and ensuring a continuous, high-quality user experience.

Introduced in May 2008, XenDesktop has been adopted by forward-thinking companies worldwide and is providing them demonstrable benefits.

Swisscom IT Services (Swisscom), one of Switzerland’s largest IT service providers, uses XenDesktop to deliver a Windows® XP® desktop, a complete development environment, and all office and business applications to remote, third-party programmers. Traditional desktop deployment was unable to meet Swisscom’s cost and user-experience requirements.

“The provisioning of physical workstations including the leased lines and support would have been extremely costly for us,” explained Patrick Kaeslin, head of front-end engineering at Swisscom. “The daily replication of two to five gigabytes of data alone would have generated enormous costs”. XenDesktop also delivered the speed and high-quality user experience that Swisscom required to ensure high productivity from the remote developers. “The developers confirmed that the performance of the virtualised desktop is comparable to that of a locally installed desktop,” Kaeslin said. XenDesktop has been so successful that Swisscom is already planning to expand its implementation.

Other companies are following suit. Telefónica O² Germany GmbH & Co. OHG (Telefónica), has been using Citrix XenApp™ to deliver a point-of-sale application to retail shops. “Based on our previous experience with Citrix technology and its good performance, we decided to implement a Citrix XenDesktop solution,” said Klaus Stein, lead project manager, Telefónica. “With XenDesktop, we can ensure that developers are able to operate their virtual Windows XP desktop, including all applications, as smoothly as their locally installed user environment—regardless of the geographic distance to be covered,” said Stein. “The programmers can work at a high level of performance with the many development tools that we make available through the virtual desktops”.  Like Swisscom, Telefónica is planning to increase its deployment of XenDesktop.

Facing a challenging business environment, organisations worldwide are turning to XenDesktop as the only complete solution to drastically reduce costs and significantly simplify desktop management. XenDesktop is an entirely new way to manage desktops.