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New Horizon for Surrey County Council
~ mobile and office workers benefit from new Citrix desktop strategy ~
Surrey County Council is working with independent consultancy Centralis to roll out a new desktop strategy for 8,000 users, ten per cent of whom are mobile.
Underpinned by Citrix, the implementation will result in Surrey County Council replacing more than half of its existing 6,000 desktops across 300 sites with thin-client terminals during 2009-11.
The new system, replaces a legacy environment built on PCs running Windows 2000. Owing to a growing need for users to be more mobile and performance issues at some sites, and to reduce power requirements and costs, the County Council found that it needed a different solution. The Local Authority also uses SAP for finance, procurement and HR and when a client upgrade was required, the software was too big to roll out using traditional methods.
Centralis worked with the Local Authority to plan, design and implement a Citrix server farm capable of delivering core applications to both fat and thin client platforms, in a project named “Citrix New Horizons”. Built on Citrix XenApp™, Enterprise Edition and Citrix® EdgeSight®, Surrey County Council also uses bespoke Centralis software and virtual channels for content redirect. As a result, the County Council now has a dynamic data centre running 205 virtual servers, operating Citrix over VMware in a hosted environment designed by Centralis.
The Local Authority is planning to implement a mobile solution on top of this that will improve performance levels for mobile workers while helping to cut costs across the organisation. The system will be compatible with Government Connect security requirements.
Executive quote
“Surrey County Council is one of the largest and most progressive Local Authorities in the country. It is imperative that its IT systems are flexible, agile and secure to allow it to continue providing first-class services into the next decade and beyond,” said Rob Greenslade, sales director at Centralis.
Customer quote
“We recognised that our desktop strategy was becoming unwieldy and out-of-date and we needed to ensure that application upgrade and management costs didn’t escalate,” said Peter Sullivan, technical architect at Surrey County Council. “Operating across 300 sites, we also needed a greater degree of flexibility. Centralising all our servers and file storage in one place will improve accessibility and productivity levels – Centralis’ proven track record in delivering Citrix-based solutions in complex environments was key to the success of the project.”
Multimedia
Review a video case study of the implementation here
About the company
About Surrey County Council
Surrey County Council is one of the largest authorities in the UK, providing services to the 1.1m residents of Surrey. Services include social care, schools, fire and rescue, transportation, highways management, trading standards, waste management and democratic services.
The IMT (Information Management and Technology) department delivers IT services to 8000 users. Technical skills cover from front-line service desk through to third-line engineers for hardware support and applications development.
About Centralis
Centralis is one of the UK’s leading independent I.T. consultancies, specialising in delivering applications securely to their point of use.
Formed in 1996, Centralis mission is to help customers reduce cost and improve business agility through innovative, award-winning solutions backed by top-level partnership with industry leading vendors, including Citrix, Microsoft and VMware.
Centralis provides consultancy, support, managed services and resale of selected products. Strong technical skills and commitment to delivering on time and to budget has led to long-term business partnerships with many customers across the private and public sectors, including Standard Life, Centrica, BUPA and many NHS Trusts and Universities.
Centralis remains independent, and wholly owned by employee shareholders.
Contact details
For more information or photography, please contact Patrick Hussey at LEWIS, the PR agency:
Telephone: 0161 457 2056
Email: centralis@lewispr.com
Related links
http://www.centralis.co.uk/
Technorati tags: Surrey County Council | Centralis | application delivery | desktop virtualisation | Citrix |
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