Centralized apps reduce IT costs; on-demand access improves employee productivity across 50 branch offices
Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and Saskatoon, CANADA — February 28, 2005 — AIT Canada, a distributor of industrial, fluid power, and engineered products and systems, said today it has standardized on access infrastructure from Citrix Systems Inc. The company is using the Secure by Design capability of Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite to deliver and manage access to a mix of Windows productivity and accounting applications and proprietary UNIX enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
With the MetaFrame Access Suite as its end-to-end access infrastructure system, AIT Canada said it is better able to ensure the security of corporate data by centralizing it in one location, creating an IT environment that is secure by design.
Additionally, AIT has improved helpdesk and training efficiency by deploying a standardized desktop.
To extend these benefits across its growing enterprise, AIT Canada has increased its use of Citrix over the last five years. Ninety-five percent of the company's application software is now accessed via Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server. The goal is to reach 100 percent within 12 months.
"Our business requires secure access to accurate, up-to-date information. We don't want islands of data sitting out in the field, where they are vulnerable to various security threats," said Peter Noyes, vice president of IT, AIT Canada. "We want it to reside in a single location where it's backed up, completely protected and easily shared."
With Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server AIT Canada's IT staff is able to provide on-demand access to applications more efficiently, and has reduced associated technology costs by centrally managing and deploying computing applications in its datacenter. This eliminates the need to repeatedly travel to branch offices to load and maintain applications on individual computers spread across four Canadian provinces. A centralized data repository ensures corporate information is safeguarded and is instantly accessible to authorized users across the corporation.
With Citrix, AIT Canada said it has also been able to reduce costs by delivering high performance on low-cost and legacy computing systems. Because Citrix is not dependent on the latest desktop system to run, AIT Canada has reduced hardware costs by deploying less expensive PCs as well as keeping older machines effective for longer periods of time.
"We saw the value in centralizing our IT infrastructure, having previously moved our UNIX ERP system and data to the head office, so Citrix's access infrastructure was a logical next step for the company," noted Noyes. "Citrix is strategic for us in the sense that it fits our model of centralized processing and storage of data to a 'T.' The bottom line is you just can't operate your IT infrastructure cost effectively on a decentralized basis given today's economics."
