Virtualizing a Business Operations Center

Company Profile

Hotel chain for both business and leisure travelers.

Challenges

This hotel chain had traditional desktop PCs in each hotel which acted as a Business Operations Center.  These PCs handled reservations, finance, and payroll functions within the company.  With little to no IT staff on location, the company was looking to increase reliability, stability, and efficiency while reducing TCO.

Selection Criteria

In order to lower IT costs and TCO, the company wanted to look into virtualization.  To implement this change, the company wanted a virtual desktop solution that was scalable, secure, and could work over the WAN.

Solution

Multiple virtualization solutions were reviewed by the customer.  Citrix was chosen because of the WAN connectivity requirements and the fact that the solution could scale to meet the company’s needs.

Results

Utilizing XenDesktop, the hotel chain was able to virtualize the Business Operations Center.  This has helped reduce the company’s IT costs by increasing efficiency.  By centralizing the virtual desktop images, uptime and reliability were improved.  While this deployment was at a pilot location, the expansion plans for the hotel properties will most likely end up leading to regional datacenters with WAN connectivity.  Since this solution is scalable, it will easily fit into their regional data center plans.

By centralizing the virtual desktop images, uptime and reliability were improved.