Through its network of 40 locations, 1,000 vehicles and 2,000 dedicated staff, Finland’s leading private transport system Suomen Kaukokiito Oy is responsible for 3.5 million package deliveries each year.
Ensuring the safe and efficient delivery of so many packages requires an effective ERP system and the agility to adapt systems to emerging changes in the business environment. However, as Systems Manager Patrick Juuti explains, IT resources are limited: “We have a team of 15, but half of those are on support. On the infrastructure management side, there is only me.”
Kaukokiito wanted to move its infrastructure to the cloud to simplify IT management and enable IT staff to be more productive. But the company’s specialized finance software posed a particular problem. Juuti says, “It dates from the 1980s and wasn’t designed for today’s challenges. It was intended to be located in the same building as its users, not in a separate data center, and is very sensitive to latency.”
Juuti and the Kaukokiito team worked with Silver Citrix Solution Advisor (and Microsoft Gold Partner) Onrego to design and deploy a solution using Citrix Virtual Apps (formerly XenApp Service) through Citrix Cloud.
"We can now deploy a new Citrix farm in a day instead of a month.”
Kaukokiito’s core applications ERP and finance systems now run on Citrix Virtual Apps in the cloud, meaning that the server infrastructure is always up to date and secure.
“The ease of system management we get from Citrix and the cloud is key,” Juuti says. “It means I don’t have to invest in, configure, and manage on-premises servers for the workload. And if we need to expand, we can now deploy a new Citrix farm in a day instead of a week or month. Our speed of deployment is much faster than before.”
As a result, Juuti and the IT team can be more productive and plan for the future, anticipating the needs of their business.
“We now have time for the big picture rather than just the day-to-day,” he explains. “We can develop a lot more in-house and we can make software changes much more quickly to respond to business needs. With Citrix, our time is freed for better use.”
A system that is faster, more stable, and secure.
With Kaukokiito’s infrastructure always up to date, employees are assured of a stable, reliable system. Important applications like ERP and finance are virtualized and run in the data center, reducing the previous issues of latency between client and server.
“Security is always at the top of the list,” says Juuti. “Even with our limited resources, Citrix makes it easy to control, and we value the ability to manage secure access at a policy group level. That is great added value for us.”
Kaukokiito’s staff and management travel a lot between its various locations, accessing their business resources on laptops or even iPads. With Citrix, data stays securely within the data center so that information is not compromised if a device is lost or stolen.
Looking ahead
To further modernize its infrastructure, the company is kicking off a proof-of-concept to explore how Citrix SD-WAN could help reduce the cost of bandwidth by enabling the business to make greater use of “consumer connections” for its 40 locations.
Thinking ahead, Juuti says, “We think that SD-WAN will give us greater fault tolerance across the network, significant cost savings, and increased bandwidth.”
