Furniture retailer standardizes on Citrix; gains access to centralized apps, simplifies support, reduces IT expenses
Fort Lauderdale, FL — November 4, 2004 — Steinhafels Inc., a furniture retailer based in Milwaukee, Wisc., said it has standardized on Citrix Systems Inc.'s access infrastructure for efficient access to enterprise applications and information.
Steinhafels' employees in the company's headquarters and four remote locations access key applications maintained on centralized servers instead of local personal computers (PCs), reducing costs and simplifying application upgrades and system management for the company's information technology (IT) department.
To accommodate its quick expansion, the furniture retailer's IT function grew from about a dozen workgroup computers in a peer-to-peer network to a complex server-based data center. A small four-person IT staff was tasked to support an employee base of more than 200 administrative, accounting, warehouse, merchandising and business management personnel located in the company's headquarters and retail stores.
Steinhafels said it needed an effective, low-cost information access solution that would minimize the travel and support costs associated with managing and supporting different types of applications installed on distributed PCs. At the same time, the company needed to provide office and store personnel with real-time access to critical applications and information from a variety of disparate locations.
After considering various other solutions Steinhafels standardized on the Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server for application access and deployment. Through Citrix access infrastructure, the company's IT department has centrally deployed several business applications, including terminal emulation software, warehouse management software, point-of-sale (POS) label-making software, and the interaction client for the company's call center, among others.
Steinhafels said the access infrastructure has made it possible for the IT department to provide the company's user community with uniform access to the latest applications without straining its budget by hiring additional support personnel.
"We have more than 200 devices in our network, and Citrix makes administration a breeze," commented Dawn Hinz, Steinhafels' Network Administrator. "If our department did not have Citrix access infrastructure to centrally manage application upgrades, we would be facing a logistical nightmare and an IT department stretched way too thin."
Steinhafels is also using Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server advanced load management and session shadowing features to streamline operations. The advanced load management feature lets the IT department deploy an application and test it locally on one server before deploying it company-wide, while session shadowing makes it possible for the help desk to troubleshoot and solve user problems remotely.
