Bharat Forge nails in desktop virtualisation

INDIA: Citrix announced the deployment of XenDesktop, its desktop virtualisation solution at Bharat Forge Ltd, a provider of critical components to automotive & industrial sectors and the flagship company of $2.5 billion Kalyani Group.

The implementation, as per the announcement, has resulted in improved efficiency and manageability and increased data security for Bharat Forge as the solution utilizing a scalable building-block approach which can deliver applications to any device in any workplace environment.

Through the years, Kalyani Group has been on a fast-track course of growth, by means of acquisitions and resultant geographical expansion initiatives. The widespread nature of business operations created systemic IT issues such as a thick client architecture posing a bandwidth issue to render applications as well as sub optimal support & security for company sites in remote areas. To address these concerns, the company decided to use a progressive technology like desktop virtualisation and selected Citrix as its preferred solution.

"Citrix's XenDesktop has proven to be a compelling strategy to increasing employee productivity, IT manageability and better security of data in the context of a far-flung location base of our organisation." said Yogesh Zope, Group CIO at Bharat Forge elaborating on the benefits augured by the solution. "We plan to replicate this success by scaling up the deployment to 400 licenses by the end of the year."

"Increasingly, conglomerates are recognizing the business transformational capabilities of technologies such as desktop virtualisation and mobility solutions towards increased productivity and better IT manageability." said Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice President, India Subcontinent, Citrix.

Through a phased manner, the implementation began with virtualising the applications that were used by IT and was then extended to ERP, Tally and other business critical applications in the group. Although, the solution was implemented across multiple geographies, the consolidation of all its servers at one central location ensured manageability and better control.

The implementation also augured well from a security and manageability standpoint. With the applications now hosted at the central servers, the company is now able to stream a single desktop image over the local area network to be accessed by thin clients. For home and remote users, the solution has empowered employees to access any data from anywhere with complete freedom of device choice.