The Quito Electrical Company (Empresa Eléctrica de Quito) has been focusing on the generation, purchase, distribution and marketing of electrical energy since 1894. It currently has 1,500 employees at the plant and has been named one of the 20 largest businesses in Ecuador by Vistazo Magazine.

The challenge: Providing application updates to users in real time

The Technology Division for Information and Communication at Quito Electrical supports a thousand workstations. Previously, applications ran locally on those devices, leading to delays in implementing updates. The division needed a technological solution that could shorten application update times, giving users new versions in real time.

“The main problem was that the executable programs were on the workstations of the individual users and every time there was a change or a system version was renewed, it meant that it was necessary to update the new version at each workstation,” explained Francisco Larrea, head of the Technology Division. “Adding to this problem was the fact that many users were long-distance agents, and therefore there were long delays before the changes could be made.”

Implementing an application virtualization solution from Citrix

Quito Electrical Company implemented Citrix® XenApp™, Advanced Edition in April of 2007 to deliver sales, financial and human resources applications to nearly 250 users. The Citrix solution was implemented with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 on a latest-generation blade server with six assigned blades. Two staff members from the computer center and business application developers took part in the process, under the watchful eye of Tecnologia Avanzada del Ecuador, a Gold Citrix Solution Advisor.

Accelerating delivery of new application versions

“With Citrix XenApp, we were able to centralize application administration in the datacenter, thus reducing the time required to update applications by 80 percent,” said Larrea.  Changes are implemented on the servers instead of on each workstation, making the latest application version immediately available to all users, regardless of where they are located. In the same way, version control and application backups are centrally managed with XenApp technology.

Reducing IT costs and bandwidth demands

Following the implementation of XenApp, Quito Electrical has lowered its operational costs. IT staff no longer have to visit each workstation to deploy and configure applications, saving time and money.  “In operational costs it could be said that it is a four to one benefit/cost relationship,” commented Larrea.

Further, the Citrix solution enables the use of electronic kiosks in each of the collection agencies that workers can use to access applications. Still another benefit is higher performance: because XenApp uses very limited bandwidth for delivery of virtualized applications, large files can be sent between agencies much faster over existing networks.

He concluded, “The true benefit of XenApp lies in the implementation of a solution that supports operations and management activities with cutting-edge technology tools, helping guarantee a high level of resource availability in the IT infrastructure.”

Future plans

Quito Electrical plans to upgrade to the latest version of XenApp and is also considering Citrix® XenServer™ for server virtualization.

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).

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