Having flexible IT is crucial for giving designers and engineers the freedom to work creatively, and remain competitive in a changeable marketplace. We spoke to Mert Bilgin, Virtualisation Engineer at Ford Otosan about the difference Citrix makes.

Tell us about Ford Otosan

“Ford Otosan is a joint venture created by the coming together of Ford and Otosan in Turkey. In its current form, the venture was established in 1959, but relations go back to 1928.

“It’s Europe’s largest commercial vehicle producer. We have five production facilities throughout the country and produced 373,000 vehicles in 2017. We also have product development, sales and after sales functions. There are around 11,000 employees.”

You design, as well as manufacture?

“Yes, we have three design centres and around 1,300 engineers working in R&D. We design the chassis, exterior and interiors of some of Ford’s biggest selling commercial vehicles.”

How does IT support the business?

“We work with a lot of three-dimensional data in all of our research and development processes. As a business our goal is to provide a digital workplace for our staff. We want to create an energy efficient platform which is independent from hardware and location, has the highest level of data protection, and which will protect the environment.

“One of our most important aims is to increase the flexibility and productivity of employees.”

Was there a specific issue you were looking at?

“Our engineers need to have high-performance workstations. We want to virtualise this environment, to create efficiencies in cost, performance and energy usage. We looked at solutions from VMware and Citrix — and our tests showed Citrix to be the best.”

Tell us about those tests

“In the test environment it was clear that the GPU virtualisation and VDI structures of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops had a higher performance rate. There was not one problem that could not be addressed by Citrix. Also, we had positive feedback from end-users.”

How are you using Citrix?

“Today, we have 200 or so engineers working off Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops, accessing CAD, CAE and PLM applications on 3D vehicle and motor data. For now, all these are in the Istanbul office, but the plan is to roll-out virtual desktops to other offices. We aim to have 300 licences in use by 2019.

“We have a Citrix pool built on the NVIDIA GRID™ K2 card. This is just the start of our virtualisation programme. Citrix is an important platform in helping us reach our goals.”

What has been the impact for users?

“Freedom and mobility. With Citrix, users can work anywhere and with the highest level of data protection. It has been simple to use and performs as we wanted. It improves collaboration between teams, which ultimately improves productivity.

“Citrix gives us the certainty and stability of a physical environment, without any of the restrictions.”

And for the IT function?

“The biggest benefits have been around security, speed and central management. It has created a real difference.”

What is it you like most about Citrix? And how might you work with Citrix in the future?

“Firstly, centralised management. Secondly, users being able to work from anywhere. And the fact we’re better able to prevent large scale data losses.

“The next step is to expand the compute power available to the design team. We’ll then add Citrix Networking.

“Our plan is to expand our Citrix implementation and to have users work completely on the Citrix platform across the business. We want to extend the benefits of remote working to all white-collar employees, not just the design and engineering teams.”