Today’s top IT leaders are careful in their decision-making process. They consider the utilization of products that they already own and the implications of adding new technology to the stack. Those who don’t carefully manage these criteria find themselves buried in technical debt and are forced to shift efforts from innovation to maintenance, never having time or resources to put towards transformation.

Requirements like SaaS, web, and mobile apps are coming at organizations fast. When IT leaders take the short-term perspective and add new technology without considering the long-term ramifications, technical debt is created. The question that arises is, “How does an organization ensure they are fully utilizing the technology that they already own while also adopting new technology that will give them a competitive advantage in the market?”

We see this challenge often. The expansion of the IT stack has driven many companies to deliver hundreds of independent apps, in various ways, that force users to navigate among different performance outcomes, different environments, and different credentials.

Let’s take a look at longtime Citrix customer CooperVision and how they have successfully managed technical debt while modernizing their infrastructure.

CooperVision is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of soft contact lenses. Their products are sold in more than 100 countries around the world, and the expansiveness of their business requires consistent adaptation of their IT infrastructure.

CooperVision’s Citrix Journey

CooperVision has been a Citrix customer since 2006. Like many Citrix customers, they started their journey with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, which has become CooperVision’s primary method of delivering business applications. Over the last few years, CooperVision has been moving away from on-premises deployments at each of their facilities and has consolidated to the data center. They have three major regions for their data centers: the US, the UK, and Asia PAC. The US data center is their main hub, where all the virtualized apps are published. The next step will be to bring in more cloud resources and create a hybrid-cloud environment.

CooperVision is currently publishing around 200 virtual app resources and using Citrix ADCs for both global load balancing (GSLB) and load balancing internal services. They have a virtual desktop site in all three data centers, and they are leveraging Citrix Gateway to give internal and external users the ability to access their published resources via a browser.

The First Move to the Cloud

The first use case that CooperVison addressed with a cloud solution was moving traditional network shared drives to cloud storage with Citrix Content Collaboration. Users now use it as their home directory. It gives them the ability to access their files regardless of the device that they are on.

IT also started seeing different departments adopt various Content Collaboration features on their own accord. HR became heavy users of the encrypted email feature, and the finance department started building their own feedback and approval workflows.

For the IT department, this was a huge win. They were able to delegate permission responsibility from the file server admin to the owner of the document, and departments were adopting features that required no input from the IT team. They were also pleased that users now have the ability to collaborate with Office 365 and still have a specific document owner.

Adopting Citrix Endpoint Management

The next step in the journey was to implement Citrix Endpoint Management (CEM). CooperVision made the strategic decision to move away from MobileIron to CEM.

The majority of their users have corporate-owned devices which they enrolled in MDM. However, they ran into a challenge in managing devices for contract workers and their sales group. For these groups, they used MAM enrollment. This enables CooperVision to give these user groups the ability to use native mail and to apply additional security to necessary business mobile apps.

Using the Citrix MDX service, CooperVision has the ability to wrap mobile apps so they can be managed by CEM without the need to MDM enroll the device. With the exception of the two groups above, the whole company uses SecureMail as their mobile email client.

CooperVision — A Model for Modernizing Infrastructure

All in all, CooperVision is steadily moving deeper into the Workspace. They have realized the value of the solution and are moving to implement more of the capabilities that they own as a part of Citrix Workspace. They are modernizing their infrastructure, mitigating tech debt, and providing a complete workspace to their end users. CooperVision is a shining example of the journey that many of our customers are on with us. We’re happy that they have chosen us to partner with on their digital transformation journey.

If you are attending Citrix Synergy 2019 and want to hear more about CooperVision’s journey, join us for SYN124: Using Citrix Workspace to drive business growth cost-effectively on Thursday May, 23, at 3:30 p.m.