Electric Supply Distributor deploys virtual desktops for increased mobility, productivity and business continuity
0 likes376 views
Revere Electric Supply, a 100-year-old electrical supply distributor based in Chicago, faced challenges in managing diverse computing systems as employees used personal laptops for work. By deploying RingCube vDesk, they improved remote work capabilities, reduced IT support calls, and enhanced employee productivity while minimizing hardware costs. The solution provided a seamless virtual desktop experience, enabling business continuity during emergencies and extending the life of existing hardware.
Electric Supply Distributor deploys virtual desktops for increased mobility, productivity and business continuity
- 1. CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Executive Summary Revere Electric Supply Industry: Electronics Location: Chicago, IL Electric Supply Distributor Employees: 200+ Deploys Virtual Desktops for Business Challenge: • Needed a solution that was Increased Mobility, Productivity fast and secure to provide a virtual desktop on PC and/or and Business Continuity USB drives to support users with managed desktops and employee-owned laptops. Revere Electric Supply Keeps Remote Workers • Needed to avoid costly Productive with RingCube vDesk server hardware and additional OS licenses. • Reduce the number of IT Revere Electric Supply is a one hundred year old, fourth generation support tickets and family owned distributor of electrical supplies and electro-pneumatic troubleshooting on non- products. The company’s headquarters are on the west side of standard systems in the Chicago where it has become a staple for over 50 years. The field. company has approximately 200 full-time employees and has Solution: multiple locations, including four sites in Illinois, which includes the • Deploy a virtual desktop company’s headquarters as well as a site in Wisconsin. Customer solution on employee owned types range from two person shops and small- and medium-sized laptops that provides businesses to multinational Enterprise-sized companies. granular host isolation, security policy enforcement, Business Challenge and centralized management. The computing infrastructure at Revere Electric Supply is a mix of • Virtual Desktop solution employee owned laptops for outside sales and desktop computers must deliver a high that are primarily used by warehouse and administrative workers. performance end-user experience that has the For sales representatives, Revere Electric Supply deploys business same level of usability as a critical applications including Fortinet Endpoint Security, a VPN for traditional desktop sales to access the corporate network remotely and an ERP environment. applications with an installed client. The company’s small IT staff of four is responsible for supporting employees company-wide and Business Results: managing technical challenges. • Business Continuity to keep employees productive in the Since the Revere sales staff is responsible for supplying their own event of a pandemic, natural disaster or severe weather. laptop computers to perform their jobs, the IT staff was faced with • A drop in tech support calls managing a variety of computing systems and applications. from field sales. According to Mike Prepelica, director of IT, he and his staff were • Ability to extend life of PCs spending unduly amounts of time configuring and troubleshooting and get more mileage out of computers for sales reps and needed a solution that was easier and existing hardware and eventually offer an less costly to manage. employee-owned PC option to the entire company that both reduces TCO and increases employee satisfaction. All contents are Copyright © 2010 RingCube Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 1 of 4
- 2. CUSTOMER CASE STUDY “Because the sales reps are required to provide their own computing hardware and nothing was standardized, managing PCs for our field sales reps had become a nightmare,” said Prepelica. “We wanted to be in a position to “On top of the lack in standardization, in many allow employees to work from cases, the sales rep’s laptops were often a home in the event of an emergency family PC, which meant there could be multiple or other challenge that might users accessing the laptop and not just the sales rep. The IT group needed a way to be able to prevent someone from coming into provide virtual instances over the PC to keep the office to work. Just a few weeks Revere Electric Supply-related business ago we experienced a snow storm separate and secure from other users.” that dropped nearly 13-inches of snow and most employees were Prepelica says that the time he and his staff not able to come into the office. were spending getting new sales reps up and With vDesk up and running, the running and supporting technical issues was employee productivity problem is draining company resources. solved.” “As a standard practice, we were sending new Mike Prepelica field sales reps a CD to install software, but Director of Information Technology most of the reps are not very technical and we’d Revere Electric Supply Company end up on multiple calls to troubleshoot PC issues. In many instances, we’d eventually have them bring their laptops into the office. This was proving to be a tremendous time waster for the company and we needed a streamlined solution that could free up the IT staff’s time to do other things.” Desktop Virtualization Solution Prepelica and his team conducted a pilot test of Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View and RingCube vDesk to support remote workers. “We were already using VMware and had a good understanding of virtualization for servers and wanted to see how it could apply to the desktop,” says Prepelica. “We compared Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View to vDesk and found that VMware and Citrix were using underlying hardware resources that were impacting the WAN. At the end of the day, the VDI solutions required more hardware build-outs and did not provide good enough connections or a low enough latency to give our field sales an acceptable approach.” Prepelica says that after testing vDesk next to the other VDI solutions the choice was clear. All contents are Copyright © 2010 RingCube Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 2 of 4
- 3. CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Comparison of VDI vs. Virtual Workspaces “I had read up on the available desktop virtualization solutions and was very curious about vDesk,” says Prepelica. “We conducted a limited pilot with vDesk and tested it with a small handful of instances within the IT team using a couple of different profiles. After a couple of weeks we realized that the performance we achieved with vDesk was hands down better.” Prepelica also says that price strongly factored into his team’s decision to go with vDesk. “With vDesk we didn’t have to host the desktop environment in the data center, which meant our server usage was lower,” said Prepelica. “vDesk also allowed us to leverage the user’s own PCs and just give them each a USB with the software preloaded and did not have to purchase extra Windows licenses. Combining overall performance and price, vDesk was the logical choice for us.” The ability for vDesk to provide a turnkey business continuity solution was also a factor in Prepelica’s selection. In the event of a pandemic flu outbreak, natural disaster or a severe snow storm, vDesk enable Revere Electric Supply employees to stay productive at home. “We wanted to be in a position to allow employees to work from home in the event of an emergency or other challenge that might prevent someone from coming into the office to work,” says Prepelica. “Just a few weeks ago we experienced a snow storm that dropped nearly 14- inches of snow and most employees were not able to come into the office. With vDesk up and running, the employee productivity problem is solved.” Business Results Since Prepelica and his team have begun their staggered rollout of vDesk, the number of tech support calls from the field has dropped. “vDesk was a breeze to install and easy for our sales reps to use,” says Prepelica. “We haven’t received a lot of feedback from the field, but when there is a problem, believe me we hear it. In this case, I’d say no news is good news.” In terms of ROI, Prepelica estimates that he will quickly recover the cost vDesk based on reduced IT support costs and increased user productivity. All contents are Copyright © 2010 RingCube Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 3 of 4
- 4. CUSTOMER CASE STUDY “Since deploying vDesk, I estimate that IT spends less than half the time to get a new sales rep up and running with a properly configured and installed corporate PC environment. Considering our IT technician’s hourly rate is $120, we are saving several hundreds of dollars per incident by using vDesk to deliver, manage and update virtual workspaces.” Prepelica says he and his team are so impressed with vDesk that they are now looking into other use cases beyond business continuity and supporting remote workers, and are exploring ways to leverage the technology to further save on hardware costs. “I’ve begun looking into how we can use vDesk on our warehouse computers to extend the life of the hardware and get more use out of it before upgrading,” says Prepelica. “Normally we would trade in computers before the warranty was up, but with vDesk we could just drop in an image, perform a few Windows updates and have the older computers running like new again.” For More Information To find out more about RingCube vDesk, please visit: http://www.ringcube.com/portal/content/products/vdesk/ RingCube Technologies, Inc. 100 W Evelyn Ave., Suite 210 Mountain View, CA 94041 www.ringcube.com Main: 1.866.323.4278 International: 650.605.6900 Fax: 408.605.6901 All contents are Copyright © 2010 RingCube Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 4 of 4