Case Studies > Leading insurance provider selects AppSense for their desktop virtualization deployment to support offshore developers

Leading insurance provider selects AppSense for their desktop virtualization deployment to support offshore developers

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America
Asia
Europe

Country

Australia

Product

AppSense Management Suite
AppSense Performance Manager
AppSense Environment Manager
Citrix XenDesktop
Citrix Provisioning Server

Tech Stack

Desktop Virtualization
User Environment Management (UEM)
Citrix XenApp

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Facility Management

Use Cases

Remote Asset Management
Remote Collaboration
Remote Control

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration

About The Customer

QBE Insurance Group Limited is an Australian-based general insurance provider and one of the top 25 insurers and reinsurers worldwide with offices in 49 countries. With more than 13,000 employees, QBE maintains operations in key global insurance markets and continues to be a lead underwriter for selected lines of business, setting rates and conditions in the markets in which they operate. QBE Group has successfully completed more than 125 acquisitions since their first acquisition in 1982 and has grown substantially, particularly over the last 10 years. In 2009, QBE’s gross written premium was $14.5 billion.

The Challenge

For the past few years, the IT department at QBE had been looking into desktop virtualization to determine if there was a solid use case for it in their desktop environment; however it wasn’t until they outsourced the majority of their application developers they realized adopting desktop virtualization was a necessity for their offshore development. To accommodate their needs, QBE deployed Citrix XenDesktop in early 2009. Initially when they were testing the virtual desktop deployment they used their standard desktop build and architecture including login scripts, preconfigured group policy object scenarios, and roaming profiles. However, the startup and logon times were very slow and would have been unacceptable, especially compared to their physical desktops.

The Solution

Over the past seven years, QBE has been using AppSense Performance Manager in their Citrix XenApp environment to improve server utilization rates for which they hold 3,000 licenses of AppSense Management Suite. QBE also deployed AppSense Environment Manager in 2009 to help them manage user profiles. Managing user profiles is extremely important to QBE and the decision to choose AppSense was straightforward. AppSense Environment Manager’s feature-set is very comprehensive and no other user virtualization technology came close to what they needed. Additionally, they found AppSense easy to setup and manage, allowing them to get up and running quickly. QBE rolled out AppSense on their virtual desktop deployment in segments, adding groups at a time. AppSense Environment Manager has allowed them to quickly add new users, significantly decreasing the time IT typically spent on this task. By delivering virtual desktops in the way that they do and by using AppSense, QBE saves a weeks’ worth of effort for every 20 users that are added.

Operational Impact

AppSense Environment Manager has helped decrease the logon times experienced by the users, and simplified management.
QBE has been able to reduce virtual desktop logon times by 50 to 60 percent by removing the login scripts and GPOs and placing the information into AppSense Environment Manager.
AppSense has also made logon times quicker than a traditional PC by about 10 percent, significantly increasing end user productivity.
AppSense Environment Manager allows QBE to deploy a shared desktop image to users using Citrix Provisioning Server while retaining all of the user configuration settings between different sessions.
QBE places a high value on end user acceptance as the IT team realizes that it is extremely important to ensure high productivity and end user satisfaction. After deploying AppSense Environment Manager, end users were unable to differentiate between their physical and virtual machine.

Quantitative Benefit

QBE saved approximately five terabytes of storage for their first deployment of 150 virtual desktops compared with traditional virtual machine cloning.