ABM INDUSTRIES ENTERPRISE ON-DEMAND ACCESS IMPLEMENTATION

ABM INDUSTRIES' ENTERPRISE ON-DEMAND ACCESS 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

 

ABM Industries was the first Fortune 1000 company to deploy an enterprise on-demand access architecture for all users throughout the enterprise. With annualized revenues of over $2 billion and more than 70,000 employees , ABM provides outsourced facility services to thousands of customers in hundreds of cities across North America. In late 1998, management had 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 1,000 PCs that were nonY2K 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 on-demand access 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 New Jersey as part of a disaster recovery contract with a business continuity firm.

Seventy-five dual CPU Dell Presentation Server servers in the data center support 3,300 concurrent users at headquarters and across the country. A Cisco gigabit backbone connects the Citrix server farm and other servers. All users store their personal and shared files on a network-attached storage device. More than a terabyte of information is stored on this virtual 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 ICA client software. Figure 1-6 shows a schematic of the ABM on-demand access architecture.

Figure 1-6: ABM Industries' Enterprise on-demand access platform

ABM Industries performed a detailed and conservative cost analysis that projected minimum five-year savings of over $10 million from switching their first 2,500 users to on-demand access.

ABM is hardly alone in its enthusiasm for on-demand access as the corporate standard. Many other small and large organizations are embracing Citrix Access Suite on an enterprise scale. With a single investment in the Citrix Access Platform, they improve IT efficiency, increase employee mobility, and accelerate business agility.