Simplifying IT Infrastructure Management for a Consumer Electronics Company

Client Profile

The customer is a globally renowned company with a massive portfolio of Consumer Products, Luminaires, and EPC (Illumination, Transmission Towers and Power Distribution). It has 18 branch offices and 468 consumer care centers, spread in different parts of their country besides being supported by a chain of Dealers and Distributors across the country. 

Challenges

The company was looking at overhauling its distributed IT infrastructure spread across all its branch offices to a centralized virtual infrastructure to improve end-user experience and simplify IT management while reducing the cost of application delivery. 

Given the distributed nature of the existing IT infrastructure, the company was facing the following challenges: 

• Poor application availability: The existing application availability stood at a meagre 90%. 
• Tedious IT management: IT teams were facing difficulties while managing network issues, server errors, misconfigurations, hard-disk failures, and virus attacks. Incident-to-user ratios were at an all-time high of 1.2 -2 per user/month. 
• Poor end-user experience: End-users experience frequent downtime and system crashes, causing data loss. Additionally, they also encountered difficulties logging into systems due to weekend maintenance schedules. 
• Technical expertise: Centralization of the IT department, changing pace of desktop technology, end-user computing devices, security policy implementation, standardization of operating systems, and backing up of endpoint devices were additional challenges faced by the company due to a lack of skilled in-house resources. 

Anunta’s Solution

Unlike most solutions that begins at the datacenter and makes its way to the end-user level, Anunta designed an HVD-HSD solution that began at the end-user level and reverse engineered the architecture to implement an IT infrastructure that is measurable and enforceable from an end-user SLA standpoint. 

As a part of the onboarding process, end-user profiling was done at multiple levels to determine user application usage, user customization needs, types of applications that need to be delivered, and most importantly the productivity needed from each user group. 

Based on this research, Anunta sized datacenter requirements, application architecture dependencies, compliance and security, and management tools. It developed an application delivery architecture that took into account the type of access and the amount of storage required by different user groups. This ensured that task users got the right-sized CPU and high-end users got a fair share of the computing power without comprising on application performance. This also ensured that each user group had access only to the necessary applications and resolved compliance issues. 

Mobile users were provided with secure gateway options, enabling them to access their systems seamlessly. The senior management was provided with dedicated hosted virtual desktops that allowed room for customization based on their specific requirements. Anunta deployed its proprietary monitoring platform that identified how applications were behaving at the end-user terminal and generated alerts for aberrations, if any. 

Beginning with an initial 300 users, Anunta eventually facilitated the large-scale adoption of close to 1,800 end-users. 

Further, Anunta also provided the company with Managed Services through a core support team, comprising an end-user experience management team and a service assurance & customer experience management team. 

Key Benefits

Anunta’s VDI solution improved the productivity of 99% of the users while at the same time providing them with superior end-user experience. 

• 15% reduction in the cost of application delivery per user per month. 
• 70% of issues are now predicted and prevented even before they impact the end-user. 
• 99.99% application availability resulting in significantly improved end-user experience and productivity. 

– President and CIO, Global electronics company