Citrix fuels Engen`s SAP upgrade

Engen, a major player in the South African automotive fuels and lubricants sector, has completed deployment of a SAP upgrade to 340 users in 100 of its depots in the region, which the company says was fuelled by Citrix MetaFrame XPe Presentation Server for Windows, the foundation of the Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite of products.

According to Andries van der Vyver, eBusiness manager at Engen: "The upgrade to SAP R/3 from SAP R/2 could not have been done as quickly without Citrix. It would have taken weeks to roll-out the new SAP GUI to all our depots. However, with Citrix it literally took us hours, not days or weeks."

"With the Citrix model, updates to client code are performed centrally on the server, reducing the impact on users and IT staff when new applications are deployed. New applications can be quickly replicated to multiple Citrix MetaFrame XPe servers and then made available to users in minutes, leading to near-immediate access and productivity," said Van der Vyver.

Engen made the decision to go with Citrix when it conducted a major technology refresh in 2000. The petroleum company called in Dimension Data, a Gold-level member of the Citrix Solutions Network (CSN) in Cape Town, to assist with its move from a mainframe to an open systems environment and standardisation on Microsoft Windows 2000. Engen needed to put infrastructure in place that would allow its depots in remote areas to access SAP, Microsoft Outlook, and other business applications.

On the server side, Engen purchased eight Compaq DL360 servers to create a single Citrix server farm - six of these reside in Cape Town, one in Namibia and one in Botswana. Citrix MetaFrame XP consolidates and simplifies the management of all system resources into the Citrix Management Console (CMC) - a single-point command centre from which these distributed servers can be centrally managed.

Engen purchased 200 Wyse thin-client terminals, which it installed at its depots. It also used Compaq workstations with a mix of Windows 2000 and a customised version of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, as thin terminals to increase existing ROI on the hardware. Larger Compaq workstations were deployed for access to SAP.

On the networking side, Engen has its own private Frame Relay network through which 90% of its users access Citrix. The remaining users are accessing Citrix through a mix of dial-up and LAN connections.

Van der Vyver adds: "Manageability was a key issue for us. We needed to be able to easily manage and support our users, and roll-out new or updated applications quicker."

Engen can now effectively manage and upgrade all of its applications from central servers - without having to add staff and administrative burdens. Centralised management and support are vital to Engen`s aim of reducing time to deployment of upgrades and new applications.

Engen also wanted to reduce its IT support costs substantially. "The support costs for our remote sites is approximately one-third using the Citrix solution, when compared to what it would have cost to maintain and support a user in a normal PC environment," says Van der Vyver.

Engen hopes to add a further 300 users within the coming months.

Citrix MetaFrame XP also enabled Engen to extend the active life of its older desktop computers. Because the Citrix model centralises application processing on the server and transmits only the graphical interface to the user`s device, virtually any client device can be utilised.

"We also wanted to keep our existing desktops instead of replacing them, which reduced our hardware costs by 67%," adds Van der Vyver.

Engen will also be able to support more users with existing staff, since troubleshooting and technical support can be performed remotely, using MetaFrame`s advanced Session Shadowing feature, instead of visiting the desktop.

According to Trudi Khumalo, Infrastructure Support Team Leader at Engen, additional benefits since implementing the Citrix solution include: extensive use of Citrix session shadowing by SAP trainers who are using it to guide users remotely through the system; and quicker response times when sorting out support issues.

Engen is also using the Web interface feature of MetaFrame XP to publish most of its applications to the Web. The company extensively deploys its HR and safety software, SiteSafe, over the Web.

Engen also uses the secure gateway feature of MetaFrame XP to address concerns about data security over the Internet. The gateway provides standards-based encryption of data between the server and client over public networks in a way that is simple and transparent to the end-user.