Financial services
Case Study:
Virtualisation at Voca
30 March 2008
Due to growth, payment services provider Voca has,expanded from a single site to a multiple site operation with new offices in Rickmansworth, Dunstable and the City of London.
Voca recognised the advantage of a centralised IT support model in order to continue providing cost-effective support to its workforce. At the same time, Voca wanted to improve delivery of its 300 applications to drive efficiencies and create a more flexible operation for the future.
Voca identified Microsoft's SoftGrid Application Virtualisation solution as an ideal means of improving the delivery of applications to multi-site operations and promote a more flexible working environment, enabling true hot-desking.
SoftGrid was introduced to the company by distributor Interquad.
The solution transforms applications into virtualised, network-available services, resulting in dynamic delivery of software that is never installed, never conflicts, and minimises costly application compatibility testing.
Voca has virtualised around 300 applications with SoftGrid. It uses SoftGrid Application Virtualisation to support 700 users on desktops and SoftGrid Application Virtualisation for Terminal Services to support 120 users on thin clients. SoftGrid has enabled Voca to successfully manage IT operations across multiple sites while dramatically reducing support time and creating a flexible environment.
“By far the biggest advantage we’ve realised is the rapid deployment of applications,” says Irene Blaston, head of desktop and Web infrastructure at Voca. “It might have taken days beforehand to process a request for a new application, from the time that we received the request to the time it was deployed. Now it takes just seconds because we literally just have to check a box on Active Directory. It’s seamless.”
Voca has successfully introduced hot-desking, enabling flexibility for employees to work across projects and move around freely. In the past, users could only use the base Voca applications when they were at different locations, not their specialised ones. Now they can access anything from anywhere.
“I can now confidently say that we’re compliant because we’re controlling who uses the software through SoftGrid. We’ve had instances where people
had licenses but didn’t really use the applications, and now we can take away that user’s rights and re-harvest the application or adjust the license agreement,” says Blaston.