British Energy turns to AppSense to personalize the user environment
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- United Kingdom
Product
- AppSense Performance Manager
- AppSense Environment Manager
- Citrix
- Microsoft Office
- Oracle systems
Tech Stack
- User Virtualization
- Remote Access
- Application Performance Management
- Citrix
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
Applicable Industries
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Facility Management
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
- Predictive Maintenance
- Remote Control
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
About The Customer
British Energy Group is the largest producer of electricity in the UK and has built a reputation for operating one of the most reliable nuclear reactors in the world. The company is responsible for providing one sixth of the country’s energy via its eight nuclear power stations and one coal–fired plant. With 6,000 employees across the UK, British Energy is a FTSE100 company. The company’s large operations and international reputation require certain groups of employees to work remotely, managing overseas projects or travelling around the country to business meetings. However, restricted by extensive legislation from the Office of Civil and Nuclear Security (OCNS), British Energy was unable to provide remote access to business applications such as Microsoft Office or Oracle systems. This inability to access applications remotely impacted on British Energy’s productivity and market response times.
The Challenge
British Energy Group’s large operations and international reputation require certain groups of employees to work remotely, managing overseas projects or travelling around the country to business meetings. However, restricted by extensive legislation from the Office of Civil and Nuclear Security (OCNS), British Energy was unable to provide remote access to business applications such as Microsoft Office or Oracle systems. The inability to access applications remotely impacted on British Energy’s productivity and market response times and with a new CEO on board, the IT department was tasked with finding a way to provide remote access, while complying with the essential security legislation. From an initial VPN pilot, which quickly proved to be too clunky for use, they turned to Citrix. It delivered the remote access needed and sailed through OCNS accreditation. However, the Citrix environment brought its own challenges. British Energy had trouble with roaming profiles corrupting, requiring frequent resetting. Additionally, with all applications now running within Citrix, British Energy was struggling to control access policies and the servers were not able to allocate resources appropriately. With over 800 remote users on 125 Citrix servers, it only takes one user accessing one resource intensive application and complaints arise about slow logon times and interrupted application sessions. The final problem was that within Citrix, all users had standardized desktop sessions, meaning all employees working within Citrix have access to the same applications, not allowing users to personalize their desktop session in any way.
The Solution
British Energy installed AppSense Environment Manager as a solution to the personalization requirements and AppSense Performance Manager to address the resource-hungry applications. AppSense Environment Manager takes all the user’s settings and manages that information independently from the session. When a user accesses a desktop session on any device, including a mobile device through the Internet, information about that user is streamed into the session on-demand. The user sees a consistent desktop, fully personalized to their own preferences without the need for cumbersome profiles or complex scripting. AppSense Performance Manager optimizes application and user environments to ensure maximum hardware utilization with an optimal, consistent quality of service. Using AppSense Performance Manager, British Energy was able to identify the resource-hungry applications and limit the resources available to them, ensuring there is always enough capacity for every user on the server. Wilshaw comments, “I was amazed by how much logon times improved. They are a lot quicker and the application profile performance has improved by an estimated 20%. Even better, even with our most resource-intensive application we can now get an extra user onto each Citrix server - six up from five - which is a 20% improvement on server utilization too.”
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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