Jul 272012 |
Tower Hamlets Council Builds a Smarter Future with Flexible IT PracticesInitiative to Enable Flexible Working Ahead of London 2012 and Deliver Annual Savings of Over £7 Million |
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Tower Hamlets Council is migrating its entire workforce to a more flexible working environment using innovative IT solutions, enabling over 4,000 personnel to work from any location, via any computing device. Aspects of the project are due for completion ahead of London 2012, to ensure staff have flexible working options during a potentially disruptive period. The move to a Citrix desktop virtualization offering comes as part of the borough’s ‘Smarter Working’ initiative to help staff log-on from anywhere, thereby reducing the need for office space, cutting overhead costs but maintaining service levels. An initial roll out of Citrix XenDesktop® functionality to over 4000 users has been completed, with the full roll-out of desktop applications to be completed by December 2012, enabling the council to move out of its current residence Anchorage House, saving over £7 million annually. The ‘Smarter Working’ scheme is using Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 to provide Microsoft® Windows 7® desktops, on-demand, to all council workers. The virtual desktop, where applicable, will roam with employees regardless of whether their working location is internal or external to the office boundaries. Desktops can be accessed on any device, anywhere, with unparalleled simplicity and scalability, allowing staff to use personal laptops, PCs, iPads and Android-based tablets to work remotely. Tower Hamlets Council has standardized on XenDesktop due to the need to provide a workstation class desktop – providing users with a full Windows 7 virtual desktop environment – as well as to support hundreds of legacy applications that employees across the council continue to need to deliver a service. As such, Citrix AppDNA software was used to ensure application compatibility with the Windows 7 environment. The council expects to see a significant carbon footprint reduction of over 300 tons per annum via the introduction of desktop and server virtualization on Cisco Unified Computing System™ hardware - Citrix XenServer® provides the virtualization platform for both the virtual desktops and supporting Citrix components. Citrix NetScaler® 7500 will be used as the entry point for both internal and external users into the virtual desktops. Global Server Load Balancing will spread users between two data centres to give an even load, providing staff with seamless access to resources and reducing downtime. The Council will also use NetScaler to load balance Microsoft Exchange and potentially SharePoint and Lync in the future. As part of this initiative, Tower Hamlets also engaged Citrix Consulting to assist in the design of its entire Citrix environment and build the pilot solution to ensure it is tailored to meet best practice as well as Tower Hamlets’ business requirements. The Citrix solution will not only allow us to provide a more flexible and secure working environment for our employees, but also lead to business savings, having a direct impact on productivity levels and our bottom line. As London prepares for a significant year in the spotlight, we particularly wanted to ensure that employees are able to work from anywhere, providing flexibility during a potentially disruptive period. The new technology supports most staff to work at home enabling asset rationalization savings that avoid further job and service cuts. Being able to save over £7 million a year on office costs will mean that ROI on our investment in desktop virtualization will be less than two years.
Desktop virtualization has the potential to transform businesses by enabling a modern, mobile, connected workforce. As Tower Hamlets Council highlights, organizations stand to gain significantly by deploying enterprise-wide desktop virtualization due to the substantial efficiencies it delivers across an organization.
About CitrixCitrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) is the company transforming how people, businesses and IT work and collaborate in the cloud era. With market-leading cloud, collaboration, networking and virtualization technologies, Citrix powers mobile workstyles and cloud services, making complex enterprise IT simpler and more accessible for 250,000 enterprises. Citrix touches 75 percent of Internet users each day and partners with more than 10,000 companies in 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2011 was $2.21 billion. Learn more at www.citrix.com. For Citrix InvestorsThis release contains forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The forward-looking statements in this release do not constitute guarantees of future performance. Those statements involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks associated with the impact of the global economy and uncertainty in the IT spending environment, revenue growth and recognition of revenue, products and services, their development and distribution, product demand and pipeline, economic and competitive factors, the Company’s key strategic relationships, acquisition and related integration risks as well as other risks detailed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Citrix assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release or with respect to the announcements described herein. ### | The Citrix solution will not only allow us to provide a more flexible and secure working environment for our employees, but also lead to business savings, having a direct impact on productivity levels and our bottom line.
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