Boosting End User Experience and Cost Savings for a Global Fuel Systems Provider

Boosting End User Experience and Cost Savings for a Global Fuel Systems Provider
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Anunta accelerates EUC transformation for a leading global fuel systems provider for enhanced productivity.

Background & Challenges

The client is one of the leading global Fuel Solutions provider, specializing in advanced fuel dispensing equipment, electronic systems and payment, automatic tank gauging and wet-stock management solutions. Headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois, it is part of a billion-dollar manufacturing conglomerate providing world-class innovative solutions for 140+ customers worldwide.

The client was facing challenges in implementing VMware Horizon view based virtual desktop for a total of 198 users spread across three geographies – Americas, Europe and Asia. The users were mainly from Engineering department and used graphic-intensive Mechanical & Electrical CAD applications to design. These design applications required high processing speed and graphic output to work seamlessly. However, the existing systems were not able to support the high-end design graphic applications. This slowed down the work efficiency and the design work was hampered.

Additionally, each geography had their own dedicated Data Centre (DC). These Data Centers were setup with a specific focus on Data Confidentiality and Security. While the three DCs were isolated, the setup and the requirements for these were identical. There was challenge in implementation of high-end design applications individually at the three centers, though identical in nature.

The workforce spread across the different DCs also had dependency on each other even though they were working at different locations. While the work required to be undertaken at each DC was similar in nature, it required some degree of customization to suit to the nature of work of users at each location. Therefore, it was important to customize and localize the solution according to the DC requirements.

After multiple failed implementation attempts, the client reached out to Partners, who can understand their existing systems landscape and successfully complete the task. Anunta, with its years of extensive domain experience in virtual desktop implementations and metric driven approach to managed services, enabled the Client with the right assessment of their application landscape and user profiles to design a virtual desktop solution suited to their need.

What Anunta Did

Anunta identified the use cases and validated the desktop resource requirements, policies and licensing requirements. The team also assessed the existing Virtualization work undertaken by the client and their other service partners. Based on information gathered about the applications, desktops and user distribution landscape, Anunta designed and implemented the Horizon View virtual desktops, created Golden images and integrated peripherals to ease the day to day operations for engineers. Though the implementation was identical in nature, it was carried out in isolation at each data center.

Anunta implemented the Horizon View with an end to end installation and configuration of VMWare Horizon infrastructure components. The Anunta team also set up high availability (HA) database servers, connection servers, and UAG servers. As required, Anunta created two Golden Images and installed up to five simple Commercial-of-the- shelf applications (COTS) and optimized it for enhanced user performance and user experience.

Anunta also created desktop pools with instant clones and configured User Environment Manager (UEM) in AD mode with required configurations and restriction policies. Since the application used by the end-users involved high graphical output, Anunta enabled NVIDIA GPU on the VDIs. The keyboard layout was customized to enable localization for each of the three regions.

The Anunta team also assisted the client to change the Network Circuit Providers for an uninterrupted and improved network performance. In order to improve the performance of the design application, the team worked with the client to redesign a load balancer architecture, which optimized the load across thedesktops based on the application usage.

Anunta performed Systems Testing, Integration Testing, and User Acceptance Testing to validate all the functional and non-functional requirements of the client. Based on the user acceptance test (UAT) findings, customizations were further made to improve the performance. The successful User Acceptance Testing of VDI in US data center was replicated in Europe followed by Asia data center.

Value Delivered

  • Improved End-User Experience: Anunta enabled virtual desktops with high-end graphic support that led to improved end-user satisfaction and productivity. The keyboard layout was customized according to the geographies, which helped users save time and focus on more complex designs instead of spending a considerable amount of time on translating and interpreting the text.
  • Network Performance: With switching over to new Network Circuit Provider, there was a significant improvement in the network performance and near to Zero packet loss.
  • Cost Saving: With this implementation, the hardware and licenses cost was reduced by $1.5 Million from the IT budget. The ROI on hardware investment was calculated to be within a span of two years. While the Total Cost of Operations were within the expected budget, the costs saving from the initial investment enabled the business to focus on other strategic initiatives.