Reference story - O'Neill
O’Neill is one of the world’s leading youth lifestyle brands. Established in 1952, the company is devoted to the evolution of action sports. The company’s commitment to innovation has seen it develop products from the first neoprene surf wetsuit and board leash, to the world’s first stitchless board shorts and range of groundbreaking wearable electronics.
The Challenge
In 2006, supporting a highly mobile workforce, O’Neill wanted to implement a secure and stable IT environment. They also needed to free up the resources of their IT department, which were becoming increasingly bogged down with management and troubleshooting issues.
The company’s IT system also needed to have the capacity to keep up with the fast pace of the retail industry. Nowadays, the O’Neill IT department services outlets and offices in several countries. “Today we support stores in several European countries like France, Portugal, Belgium and many countries in Asia”, said Peter Maljaars, the Service Desk Manager, “this made our tasks bigger and more complex.” “We wanted to keep our infrastructure as simple as possible. Handing every staff member a complex PC would mean having to hire someone who understands it and is able to service it, for each and every store and office around the world – this would present a myriad of IT support problems, let alone increased cost.” As a result, O’Neill wanted to keep the administration of its complex Citrix environment including Citrix Enterprise Server, Citrix Access Gateway, Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 and Citrix Advanced Access Control both simple and stable. It had to accommodate the needs of a varied workforce of designers and merchandisers.
The Solution
To solve the issue, O’Neill chose RES PowerFuse to ensure the simple management of applications and improved security of corporate information. The implementation was done by PQR, RES Software Platinum Partner, who helped O’Neill with specific knowledge and implementation support of RES PowerFuse. In order to provide more stable access to its mobile workforce, O’Neill decided to move away from a traditional VPN to a Citrix SSL VPN. This would enable users to connect through a website to their O’Neill Citrix Workspace.
Using Citrix Presentation Server, O’Neill deployed RES PowerFuse to manage their entire environment, choosing to roll out both RES PowerFuse and the new Citrix SSL VPN at the same time. Prior to this roll out the organisation only had one Citrix Metaframe XP 1.0 server which only served a small amount of users each day.
Implementing RES PowerFuse has had a dramatic impact on the organisation. Users are now able to connect through a website to their O’Neill Citrix workspace. They are provided with secure access to a safe and stable environment that contains up-to-date information. “It no longer makes a difference where you work, what hardware you use or what your network capacity is,” comments Maljaars. “RES PowerFuse security and configuration management ensures that users have access to only the folders and data they are permitted to and managing this is now a simple task. Therefore using RES PowerFuse saves the company valuable time.
“The deployment has had a major impact on the availability of the services we need to successfully manage our business. We lived through three Citrix implementations, which marginally increased the stability of our service. Our third software supplier PQR finally recommended implementing RES Software solutions. After just two weeks of testing, we were impressed by the increase in stability. The system simply never fails anymore.”
The Benefits
The most dramatic impact of the roll out has been the decrease in troubleshooting by O’Neill’s IT department. “These days, when a user reports an issue, RES PowerFuse gives us the capacity to see exactly what caused the issue and when it happened. This drastically improves IT support downtime and in the end saves the company money.” The company also has to spend far less time maintaining and configuring its Citrix servers. The difference in hours spent helping users is significant, says Maljaars: “Without RES PowerFuse, we would have needed more IT staff to service our current users. Today IT can look forward to servicing even more countries, offices and stores.” O’Neill’s IT department has noticed that RES PowerFuse has eased the configuration of Citrix. “RES PowerFuse takes away all the need to write and maintain scripts for each and every task. We figure out just once how to install a new application and we can deploy it to the entire user base, which has saved us an incredible amount of time.” O’Neill’s employees now have the added benefit of accessing a secure and stable desktop and up-to-date information in real time, even when they are out on the road: “Our employees have almost forgotten how poorly the system performed before we used RES PowerFuse.”
The Future
O’Neill’s implementation of RES PowerFuse has ensured that the company is operating an IT environment that is controlled, more secure and simple to use. O’Neill hopes that this roll out will continue to improve the productivity of its mobile workers. Maljaars explains “RES PowerFuse is an innovative solution for O’Neill. It is reliable and easy to maintain. The deployment means our IT staff can now put their time to better use and our mobile staff has controlled access to a stable and secure IT environment and the essential information they need.”
It no longer makes a difference where you work, what hardware you use or what your network capacity is.
Peter Maljaars, Service Desk Manager, Netherlands