Ireland was the first country in the DHL family to adopt the Citrix thin-client architecture for its IT users, and the experience Monahan gained there was instrumental in his being chosen to manage a rollout of the same technology throughout the entire company worldwide.
Monahan first examined the possibilities of the Citrix architecture about seven years ago. Citrix allows PCs on a network to access applications running on a server, the classic thin-client model. Only screen and keyboard refreshes are handled by the user’s own PC or terminal. All the rest of the processing takes place on the server.
Monahan moved to Citrix to reduce operating and support costs. ‘We found that we had about seven or eight people in front-line support running round the country answering calls. When we examined the logs we found that many of the problems were menial tasks like backing up data to floppy disks or installing new applications on PCs.’
‘We tested Citrix at a remote location in our office in Shannon,’ he continued, ‘and we found that the number of calls decreased by 60 per cent within one month’.
Monahan became such a strong convert to the Citrix cause that he now only allows users to have ‘thick-client’ PCs under the most stringent conditions. About 95 per cent of DHL’s computer users in Ireland have thin clients.
‘The problem you have, as with any organisation, is overcoming the “what I have I hold” mentality among users,’ he said. ‘If somebody’s got a big PC they tend not to want to give it up for a thin client. So I’m pretty dogmatic about it. When a new user starts, they have a request form to fill out. They tick the applications they need and in most cases we say: “OK. That can be done with a thin-client PC. That’s what you’re getting”.’
The exceptions are eight people who require specialist applications. ‘They work in sales & marketing and finance and run business intelligence tools like Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay and Access database query applications on their own PCs,’ said Monahan. Because those applications are processor intensive it’s a good idea to keep them away from the server farm to help performance. ‘They download the data they need to their thick clients and do their analysis locally without harming the server farm,’ said Monahan.
All other core applications and personal productivity tools are delivered via Citrix. Until last year many of the core applications hosted at Swords were Unix based, so it was easy to use them within the Citrix environment. All they had to do was set up terminal emulation on the client PC.
The Citrix clients were originally installed on the users’ PCs. As late as last year, Monahan examined the product portfolio to find that some people were still running ancient 486-based PCs. ‘The problem wasn’t the processing speed,’ he laughed, ‘because all the processing is done on the server. It was the length of time it took them to power up. So we did a global deal with Compaq to equip everybody with Compaq T20s thin-client machines.’
As DHL rationalises its applications worldwide, it was decided that Citrix would be key to the company’s strategy. ‘We have decided that the desktop architecture going forward is Citrix, and if an application does not run on Citrix it does not get deployed,’ said Monahan.
Inevitably there will have to be exceptions to this because some important applications do not run well within the Citrix environment. However, only in most exceptional circumstances will this be allowed and Monahan knows of only one global application that runs outside the Citrix environment, and that’s a customs application.
‘My attitude is we invested a lot of time and money putting in Citrix and I am not going to jeopardise the environment and increase support costs by running applications outside it,’ he said. However in the case of the customs application DHL is forced to concede that there are limits to its own power. ‘We can’t demand of customs offices that they change their application. Hopefully they will come round eventually but in the meantime it’s just not viable,’ said Monahan.
Monahan managed the deployment of Citrix to the company as a whole from the centralised data centre in London. At the same time, the company changed its e-mail system from Netscape to Exchange. ‘We implemented an Exchange environment in our three global databases and are now migrating our users over,’ said Monahan, who was responsible for both global rollouts. ‘It was a busy year,’ he said with understatement. ‘It was nice to get back to the day job.’
03/10/2003
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