Industry: Hospitality
Founded in 1927, The Bama Companies, Inc., is an innovator of wholesome bakery products, such as hand-held pies, biscuits, buns, pie shells, and pizza crust. Bama serves the Quick Service Restaurants, Fast Casual, Casual Dining, and Broadline Channels of the Foodservice Industry for the largest, most well-known restaurant chains on the planet.
Challenge
Bama had aging PC’s spread across their environment; they were experiencing high support costs, and needed an efficient and cost-effective plan to refresh their PC fleet.
In addition, they wanted to enhance the performance of their user associates Windows desktop environment.
They were also looking for ways to improve process management and deliver secure desktops to their manufacturers and outside the company to employees around the world. Finally, Bama hoped to provide users the same environment across various remote devices.
Solution
Eric Spille, Manager of Technical Services for Bama, turned to ISG Technology for assistance with this company-wide project. ISG worked out a program to move the company to Citrix XenDesktop Enterprise so that desktops could be delivered virtually to associates.
ISG conducted an initial pilot with 25 users to provide a proof-of-concept. Based on that success, Spille decided to expand the XenDesktop solution out to all users.
With ISG’s expertise, Bama installed redundant Citrix NetScaler controllers as access brokers to enhance the XenDesktop delivery and significantly improve the user interface. Additionally, Bama’s Exchange environment is secured by the NetScalers, which handle the security and access processes now. The Netscalers keep their data safe.
Results
Bama replaced old desktops with thin clients for an immediate cost savings and a reduction of their total cost of ownership. Refresh cycles were extended from four to eight years, which doubled the lifespan of their hardware—at half the cost.
“What made everything easier for us was the impressive level of Citrix expertise at ISG,” said Spille. “ISG knows Citrix really well. We felt very fortunate to have access to someone of that caliber. I don’t think anyone in this area even comes close.”
User experience was improved. “We can provide our employees with a Windows desktop with 12 seconds of login,” said Spille. “That’s impressive.”
Bama also experienced several incremental benefits. “While our main goal was to put a thin client at everyone’s desk, we always struggled with patches in the past,” said Spille. “This new upgrade allowed us to provide over 300 users with a single image. That’s a huge savings and process improvement for us.”
Thanks to the Netscalers, Bama also experienced an increase in data security. Executives and sales associates who access Bama’s network remotely—regardless of device—are only viewing the data they need, without having data reside on the local device itself. Company data remains safely in the data center.
Bama was impressed with ISG’s commitment to the project. “Having a single point of contact really helped the project run smoothly. Hal Davey was truly an advocate for us. ISG asked the right questions,” said Spille. “This allowed us to proactively avoid issues, and get it right the first time.”