Italy’s leading ICT group expands flexibility, scalability and responsiveness with Citrix DaaS.
“The best part of my job is making life easier for all our colleagues,” says Mauro Maccagnani, Head of Digital Enterprise Solutions at Telecom Italia (TIM). The leading ICT group in Italy and Brazil, TIM aims to bridge the digital divide, supporting the development of the digital skills necessary for the country’s growth. As Maccagnani explains, “We are trying to bring value to everything that’s done internally, to provide a better service to our external customers.”
“To achieve those objectives,” he continues, “we need flexibility, computational capacity, scalability, and we need to leverage continued technology innovation.”
In order to better support its objectives, the Group planned to migrate its on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and, as a Citrix customer for nearly ten years, decided to partner with Citrix, Google and Noovle SpA, the TIM-owned Cloud Provider Company (Citrix Service Provider and Google Cloud partner).
“You cannot ignore cloud. It is a key element to achieve our aims and it is crucial to have partners, not simply suppliers,” Maccagnani explains. “We don't have time for a multi-year journey. We need to do this as soon as possible with partners who can understand our needs and help us to accelerate the project.”
A simple migration for greater flexibility and scalability
As a pilot, Maccagnani and his team migrated the TIM Academy, the company’s online training resource, to Google Cloud. Running on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, TIM Academy provides 500 virtual desktop seats delivering training through video, web-based training, webinars, social interaction and gaming to employees. TIM migrated this to Citrix DaaS with Citrix ADC for secure access (Gateway) and load balancing on Google Cloud.
Working with Noovle, the project was completed, from design to delivery, in just six weeks.
“The migration was very fast,” agrees Maccagnani, “and the integration between Citrix and Google was obvious right from the beginning. It's clear that Google and Citrix each know how to leverage the others' technology. And Citrix technology is effectively plug-and-play on Google. You can set it up on Google Cloud very easily.”
“The key advantage of using Citrix DaaS is scalability,” he continues. “It is a very flexible solution that enables us to run hundreds or thousands of digital desktops, scaling up or scaling down according to our needs. We have a business that is changing very fast and new needs are emerging every day, so we need an infrastructure that can respond to those needs. We can scale up to meet spikes in demand and down to optimize costs. The Academy project also demonstrated the ease of setting up a new environment and a new farm of virtual desktops on the cloud.”
The ability to scale quickly helps improve TIM’s total cost of ownership (TCO) and meet its sustainability goals.
“TCO will be a key driver for us,” Maccagnani says, “and the final balance is definitely positive.”
From the sustainability side, he notes that “Previously our servers were always on. Now we can switch them on or off according to our needs. The cost savings are welcome, but this is also making our infrastructure more efficient and optimizing our energy consumption.”
Greater manageability means better customer service
Having migrated the TIM Academy, the team is now moving its network of stores to the Citrix-Google Cloud solution.
“Moving our retail stores is the key project for this year. After that, we plan to move all our other Citrix estate into the cloud. Having all our workforce on Citrix and Google Cloud will mean we have the very core of the company's technology on this solution.”
This new deployment spans multiple datacenters and Citrix ADC will be deployed to provide global server load balancing (GSLB) along with secure access and advanced load balancing capabilities.
The IT team will benefit from greater manageability and futureproofing as its infrastructure will always be up to date.
Importantly, the move to cloud will also free the team’s time to respond more quickly to the demands of the business and its market.
“Our business culture is changing,” Maccagnani explains. “We can do more and more for our customers. Citrix and Google technology is one of the key enablers to deliver services to our customers.”
