ABM Industries On-Demand Enterprise Implementation

ABM Industries' On-Demand Enterprise Implementation

Deploying JD Edwards in our fat-client PC environment would have been prohibitively expensive. The tremendous cost advantages of Citrix enabled us to deploy all applications and networking services to our users around the country, even to those working in small offices or at customer facilities. We replaced our disparate and often overlapping regional IT processing with a unified corporate IT department and approach.

—Anthony Lackey, Vice President of MIS, Chief Technology Officer, ABM Industries

According to Citrix, ABM Industries was the first Fortune 1000 company to deploy SBC for virtually all applications to every user throughout the enterprise. With annual revenues of over $2 billion and more than 62,000 employees, ABM provides outsourced facility services to thousands of customers in hundreds of cities across North America. In late 1998, management decided to implement the client-server version of JD Edwards' One World accounting system for all divisions. This would have required upgrading hundreds of PCs and many remote-office bandwidth connections. In addition, the company had nearly 1000 PCs that were non-Y2K compliant. Rather than continue the endless spiral of PC upgrades, Anthony Lackey, Director of Information Technology (he was promoted to Vice President of MIS as a result of the project success), built a strong case for embracing SBC throughout the enterprise.

ABM's rollout began only after months of in-depth design, planning, and pilot testing. They moved their data center from a San Francisco high-rise to a hosting facility that offered the advantages of high security and access to a much broader communications infrastructure. A redundant data-center hot site was set up in Scottsdale, Arizona, as part of a disaster recovery contract with SunGard, a business continuity firm.

Today, 50 top-end dual Dell servers running MetaFrame XP Presentation Server software in the data center support 2500 concurrent users at both the headquarters and at regional offices across the country. A Cisco gigabit backbone connects the MetaFrame Presentation Server server farm and other servers. All users store their personal and shared files on a network attached storage device, which includes more than a terabyte of information stored on its virtual Windows file server. Eighty percent of ABM's users work on Wyse WinTerms, while the rest use a mix of laptops and desktop computers running the Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation ICA Client software. Figure 1-6 shows a schematic of the ABM access infrastructure architecture. At the time of this writing, ABM was preparing to pilot the new products of the MetaFrame Access Suite.

Figure 1-6: ABM Industries' on-demand enterprise infrastructure

ABM Industries performed a detailed and conservative cost analysis that projected a minimum five-year savings of $19 million from switching their first 2500 users to SBC. The ABM Industries project will be referenced throughout the first half of this book as a case study showing the technical and cultural implications of transforming the distributed PC computing environment of a large organization into an on-demand enterprise.