How does Prototype IT save customers up to 75 percent on Azure consumption for their virtual application server workloads, while delivering a superior user experience? With Citrix Workspace Environment Management!

Founded in 2005, Prototype IT celebrated its 14-year anniversary as a managed service provider (MSP) last month. As a Dallas-based technology consulting firm, Prototype IT offers managed services, professional services, and cloud-hosted services to small- and mid-sized enterprises around the U.S. The company started out specializing in the hospitality vertical and have since branched out into finance, medical, nonprofit, and, really, any general commercial business. Their long-standing partnership with Citrix has enabled them to move into these new areas and optimize cost. Prototype IT can either act as an extension of their customers’ IT departments or act as their entire IT department with a solution that is tailored to each business.

“When we take on a new customer, we treat it as a true partnership,” says Richard Crooks, Chief Operating Officer at Prototype IT. “We need to understand what they do, and they need to understand what we do. We are not ‘set it and forget it IT.’ It’s a partnership that grows as our customers grow — with a goal of streamlining their IT to help them operate their businesses and meet their business objectives.”

Cloud Desktops Enable Productivity and Deliver Secure Access

Today, many customers don’t want to own their own hardware and want to reduce their data center footprint, which is why Prototype IT leads customers to their Cloud Desktops offering.

Prototype IT’s Cloud Desktops offering is much more than DaaS. It’s IT-as-a-service that provides customers with everything they need to run their business and everything their employees need to be productive: secure access to every Windows application, SaaS application, and all their data. Prototype IT becomes the customer’s entire outsourced IT department and offers a fully managed solution, tailored to their business, with all of their compute, licensing, and managed services for a predictable monthly subscription. The offering gives customers predictable billing with no upfront server refreshes, as well as scalability to grow as the business grows.

Prototype IT has many multi-site customers, and even customers with offices overseas. Prototype IT’s Cloud Desktops, powered by Citrix, enable customers to collaborate across the organization, no matter where users reside. Users are no longer tied to their office to get work done. They have the same experience, in the office, at home, or on the road. Prototype IT partners with Citrix as the workspace that delivers a single pane of glass for their customers to securely access all their applications and data, from anywhere.

“When we started looking at providing Cloud Desktops, we evaluated all the major desktops-as-a-service vendors,” says Adam G., a Solutions Architect at Prototype IT. “In all situations, there was one problem that was too big to ignore and too big to accept — and that is performance. We found that there was a huge difference between the performance of the local desktop and the desktop-as-a-service offering that would negatively impact the productivity of our customers. You have to be able to do the same things you can do in a cloud desktop as a local desktop. One of the ways we test our Cloud Desktops is we will bring up a 1080p video, and if we can’t watch it in the same way as the local desktop, then it fails the test.”

Prototype IT had experience working with Citrix on a small scale for years and determined that Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops outshined all other vendors in terms of performance, user experience, and ease of management. In fact, going back more than 13 years, before terms like cloud, SaaS, and DaaS were mainstream, Prototype IT hosted a hospitality application for a large hotel chain, leveraging Citrix technology.

Prototype IT had hosted customers out of a traditional data center, and a just few years ago made the decision to shift to Microsoft Azure. They chose Microsoft Azure because it delivers a robust, secure, and high-performing platform — and Microsoft is a name that their customers trust. In the past, when Prototype IT brought on a large customer, or a customer expanded, they had to procure more equipment and expand their data center footprint. Microsoft Azure gives them the ability to scale more rapidly, go to market quicker, and onboard new customers faster.

Avoid Sticker Shock

Public cloud offers great scalability benefits. But what are many customers’ main concern with moving to the cloud? The unpredictable cost. Many customers experience sticker shock at the end of the month when they receive their consumption bill.

Prototype IT had one customer that ran a home-grown application that used a seemingly unlimited amount of CPU. They used four 16-core Azure VMs for their virtual application servers. After they implemented the resource optimization of Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM), they transitioned to four four-core Azure VMs, resulting in huge cost savings on their customer’s monthly Azure bill. Once they saw the capabilities of WEM, they deployed it for all their Cloud Desktops customers. WEM also provides a much more consistent user experience throughout the day, even during spikes in usage.

“Without WEM, you have to account for all of the spikes throughout the day, which translates to overprovisioning your servers, which means more servers and more cost,” says Adam G. “With WEM, we can confidently run the CPU on our virtual machines at up to 90 percent utilization while maintaining a good user experience. By increasing our user density and using less resources, we’ve reduced our customers’ Azure compute bills by up to 75 percent.”

While they have realized up to a 75 percent reduction in Azure consumption with Citrix WEM, Adam says, the average is between 30 percent and 60 percent, which delivers significant cost savings to their customers and makes transitioning to Azure a viable option.

“Citrix allows us to transition our customers to Azure while giving them a very stable product at a cost-effective price,” says Richards Crooks. “This helps us increase customer retention because all of our customers have a better user experience, while effectively managing the Azure cost.”

Prototype IT is a valuable partner in the Citrix Service Provider Program, and we are excited to continue working with them on delivering value and the future of work to their customers.

Learn more about Prototype IT, and check out the latest updates on Citrix Workspace Environment Management.