Reed is the UK’s leading recruitment and HR services provider, responsible for the delivery and management of HR solutions to the public and private sectors throughout the UK and Ireland. Founded in 1960, the £700m group of companies has three divisions: Reed Specialist Recruitment, Reed Learning and Reed in Partnership. The group has 4,000 IT knowledge workers across 300 locations.

The initial challenge – 20 percent cost reduction

In 2005, Reed’s HR outsourcing arm, Reed Specialist Recruitment, looked to improve its use of IT, with the overriding aim to cut expenditure by 20 percent. At the same time, IT flexibility had to be an integral part of the solution to support rapid business growth and help win new contracts worldwide.

The bulk of the IT budget went into maintaining 4,000 legacy desktops. The group spent approximately £500,000 every year in this area alone, with the cost of powering the devices adding to the bill. Reed was also conscious of the environmental cost. Because of the company’s dedication to its carbon-neutral strategy, any IT decision needed to follow Reed’s objective to reduce its carbon footprint.

Finally, Reed was expanding globally into Ireland, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, so supporting the rollout of new offices was a top priority.

“Achieving new office rollouts in a matter of weeks is not an easy thing for any IT team,” said Sean Whetstone, head of IT Services at Reed Specialist Recruitment. “We needed to deliver on an aggressive global expansion strategy while rationalizing our use of power and hardware, all without affecting the user experience.”

Citrix XenApp delivers a streamlined response

Having considered a number of alternatives, Reed Specialist Recruitment consulted Gold Citrix Solution Advisor Teksys for guidance and was advised that Citrix XenApp™ was the best answer to its needs.

The group deployed Citrix XenApp with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003, x64 Edition on 30 64-bit HP blade servers, each supporting around 85 users. These blade servers are split across two physically separated datacenters to provide full redundancy. Secure Gateway provides universal SSL VPN access over ADSL and MPLS connections to the XenApp environment.

More than 50 applications running on XenApp, such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft® Office 2003, CBT (a training package) and an Oracle-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution, are securely delivered to approximately 3,000 users over the Web.

“We opened our Hong Kong office in just days,” Whetstone commented. “All we needed were thin-client devices and an Internet connection. The team got on a plane with an authentication token, and arrived to find a fully functioning desktop environment.”

Power saving becomes saving the environment

As the solution evolved, Reed Specialist Recruitment wanted to ensure it was also continuing to align ongoing, commercially driven improvements to the infrastructure with initiatives geared towards environmental benefits, according to Whetstone.

“Thanks to the switch to thin-client devices, our power consumption dropped significantly,” he said. “Office-based thin clients consume a tenth of the electricity of traditional PCs, while replacing laptops with mobile thin clients saved around two thirds of the power. Thin clients also use less raw material and packaging, and therefore create less CO2 in their manufacture, but we wanted to go even greener.”

Through the centralized infrastructure and the efficiencies of 64-bit computing, Whetstone’s team was able to reduce the server count from 350 to just 84 blades. The 64-bit architecture, supported by Citrix XenApp, boosted the number of users supported by each blade server from 27 to 85 – meaning more than 3,500 concurrent Citrix users. This reduction in servers made a huge difference in IT budget – the group saved £450,000 in hardware costs.

Reduced environmental impact through fewer servers and PCs also yielded financial savings. The reduction of more than 2,500 tonnes of CO2 emissions per annum equates to approx 5,500,000 kilowatt hours. This saved over £100,000 – equating to a 26 percent saving on the company’s annual utility bills.

Next steps with Citrix Delivery Center

Looking for a reliable way of load-balancing Web traffic and handling SSL certificates, Whetstone turned to Citrix again – this time to its NetScaler® appliances, which are Web application delivery controllers that combine load balancing, application acceleration and security. The ability of NetScaler solutions to accelerate application performance by up to five times and increase uptime, while requiring significantly fewer Web servers, was the key factor in the decision.

“We wanted an efficient way to load-balance secure traffic coming in to our Web-based CRM applications – which are part of our critical search and selection workflow,” he said. “The NetScaler appliances provided that… And the nice thing is I put them in and they just worked.”

With some desktops still left in the business, Whetstone is looking once again to Citrix to ensure the most efficient use of IT assets. Having replaced desktop and laptop PCs where possible, as well as having reduced storage resources through virtualization technology, Whetstone is trialing Citrix® XenDesktop™ to provide a seamless virtual desktop experience on the remaining PCs. At the same time, XenDesktop will simplify desktop management, reduce the cost of ownership and make sure the user experience is consistent across the organization.

“While the cost savings have been impressive, the real value of our Citrix investment is how it has made us a more agile business, better placed to expand globally,” concluded Whetstone. “The flexible set of tools and holistic approach that underpin Citrix Delivery Center mean we can do all this with a significantly lower impact on the environment and a richer, more consistent user experience. Citrix is a critical part of our business – now and for the future.”

About the Citrix Solution

Citrix XenApp™ is the industry’s de facto standard for delivering Windows®-based applications with the best performance, security and cost savings. Citrix® NetScaler® is a purpose-built Web application delivery solution that accelerates application performance up to five times while improving security and reducing Web infrastructure costs. Citrix® XenDesktop™ allows customers to virtualize Windows desktops in the datacenter and deliver them on demand to office workers in any location. All three are members of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family.

©2008 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix®, NetScaler®, Citrix XenApp™, Citrix Delivery Center™ and XenDesktop™ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Microsoft®, Windows® and Windows Server® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.