Remfry & Sagar is the oldest intellectual property (IP) firm in India. Intellectual property is the mainstay of the firm, which has a predominantly international clientele.

The challenge: faster application delivery and optimized bandwidth utilization

Remfry & Sagar has long been an early adopter of the latest technology to manage its practice. The firm deployed a desktop environment and, in 1998-99, felt the need to capture all IP assets managed by it for which a software solution was designed. However, the prevalent desktop environment started experiencing problems with the exponential growth in data from 2003 onwards. The problems surfaced on the hardware, application management/licensing and data-management fronts.

Highlighting the issues faced by the firm, Piyush Arora, systems administrator, Remfry & Sagar, said, “We had a critically developed IT infrastructure for a long time, and have had a desktop environment since computers were introduced in India in the ‘80s. We were using a customized software solution to manage our cases, accounts and billing programs.  However, with the exponential growth and flow of data and hardware, it was becoming difficult to keep track of licenses and software and to manage applications that were residing on desktops. Data corruption issues were endemic; updating anti-virus solutions created problems; keeping track of the software and licenses being procured was becoming difficult; and employees were finding it difficult to manage data on the desktops. Managing and solving the issues were proving cumbersome and very time-consuming.  IT managers were running all over the 40,000 sq. feet office spread over five floors troubleshooting or addressing many problems, and there was a tremendous wastage of manpower resources. Ongoing administration and continuing upgrades and replacement of PCs were becoming expensive and inflexible.”

Some quick-fix solutions were tried initially. Finally, while the team was conducting an internal software audit and generally reviewing the IT infrastructure, the idea of a centralized solution came up and was deemed to be suitable for addressing the challenges of the environment. After some enquiries and evaluation of the available solutions, Remfry & Sagar, in conjunction with its IT advisory firm Momentum Infocare Pvt. Ltd., decided to deploy a Citrix solution to end this PC management challenge and to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the IT infrastructure.

Implementing a Citrix solution for centralized application delivery

In 2007, Remfry & Sagar partnered with New Delhi-based Momentum Infocare Pvt. Ltd. (a Gold Citrix Solution Advisor) to implement a solution comprising Citrix XenApp™ and Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 running on six HP blade servers. Momentum Infocare worked extensively to provide critical inputs at all stages, including addressing some teething issues during the preliminary phase.

Currently, Remfry & Sagar is delivering Microsoft® Visio drawing software, Microsoft® Office 2007, Oracle 10Gi and multiple online billing programs (in conjunction with those compatible with their customers) to about 150 concurrent users across the organization. These users include lawyers, legal assistants and accountants. They primarily connect using Linux–based thin clients. Internet connectivity is through leased lines provided by Airtel.

Rapid application delivery is a breeze

Arora testified to the effectiveness and flexibility of the Citrix solution and acknowledged the all-round benefits for the firm.

“Citrix XenApp helps us manage our environment and is highly effective in our business environment involving the flow and management of voluminous amounts of data that need to be managed, preserved and monitored at all times. Importantly, delivery of new applications has been simplified. Updates and patch development are being done centrally regardless of the software languages, computing architectures and networks that are involved.”

Enhanced manageability leads to service excellence

Manageability was a key challenge to be addressed. Because of the masses of data involved and their criticality and integrity, centralized reporting and control of application deployment and use were critical.

Affirmed Arora, “Citrix XenApp, being like a mother ship solution, has made it very amenable for us to manage the business environment. We are able to monitor vast amounts of incoming and outgoing application data and secure it with the appropriate firewalls, multi-factor authentication and encryption technologies. There has greatly increased reliability.  Applications are upgraded on the servers; e-mail filtering and backups are also done on the servers.”

Centralized IT administration frees up strategic resources

The previous environment bogged down the IT team to a great extent and made IT administration a big challenge.  Now IT concentrates its management efforts on servers only.

“Savings in manpower have definitely been realized as currently just a two-man IT team is managing the IT needs of 150 concurrent Citrix users,” Arora noted. “Previously, I could not keep track of the numerous complaints made in a day. Now I can manage them centrally and generate a monthly report about issues raised, time required to troubleshoot a particular complaint, the coordination required with IT vendors/distributors for remote troubleshooting and other parameters. The randomness and haphazard nature of the previous environment is no longer present and it has become more streamlined and organized. We are able to see how active our IT environment is, what kinds of problems arise and the troubleshooting needed. Also, analysis of issues is much better.”

Added software developer Rakesh Bhardwaj, Remfry & Sagar, “As a software developer, I understand the need to customize our database solution and help the business side of the organization. Apart from helping in system administration, which is actually a breeze now, I have been able to constantly innovate and implement processes such as deciding the time of backup every week, which is very important in a data-intensive environment, deciding which tapes to use, devising a protocol for the Web sites being used, etc.”

About the Citrix Solution

Citrix XenApp™, a member of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, is the industry’s de facto standard for delivering Windows®-based applications with the best performance, security and cost savings. XenApp is the most complete application virtualization system available. It offers the ability to virtualize applications on both the client side and server side, delivering them on demand based on the user, the application or the location (online or offline).

©2009 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix®, Citrix XenApp™ and Citrix Delivery Center™ 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®, Visio®, 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.