Client Background

Client: A leading pharmaceutical company

Industry: Healthcare

Area of Operations: Worldwide

Products: Pharmaceuticals, drugs

Number of employees: Over 120,000

Challenge

The client’s legacy virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution was complex with limited flexibility and scalability. The client wanted flexibility to ramp up and down the number of users depending on business requirements, such as mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, as well as movement of people and workloads across regions. The client’s VDI solution had an onsite-driven support model and included multiple versions of Citrix farms with different solution architectures. This led to performance and availability issues, such as slow desktops and inability to connect to desktops, etc., affecting user productivity, especially for those accessing from remote offshore locations. The legacy environment had to be migrated to a new VDI platform and upgraded to Windows 10 with Office 365 for regulatory compliance as well as enhanced user experience.

Solution

Wipro migrated the legacy VDI platform to VirtuaDesk™, Wipro’s complete desktop virtualization solution, to address the challenges and create a roadmap for a modernized workplace as a service.

VirtuaDesk™ high performance reference architecture was based on HPE hardware, DataCore SANsymphony, Microsoft Windows, Hyper-V, System Center and Citrix software stack and easily passed the certification process for delivering pharmaceutical industry-validated applications.

As part of the transition, Wipro took over the support of the existing solution as-is, for 25,000 users in less than 10 weeks. Post support transition, the 25,000 users were migrated from the legacy platform to the new VirtuaDesk™ platform within 6 months.

The highlights of the solution are:

• Complete opex model where the usage is billed at per XenDesktop VDI/month or per XenApp VM/month
• Ability to provide persistent and stateless desktops with multiple configurations
• Provisioning automation to reduce time and increase agility
• Desktop image optimizations for performance and better license management
• End to end, automated, proactive user experience and infrastructure health monitoring to reduce incidents and improve performance and availability
• VDI integration with Microsoft Office 365 to provide improved user experience
• Scalable platform that can expand to 50,000+ users to meet customer demand

Business Impact

In the highly regulated pharmaceutical industry, there is usually a trade-off between end user experience and regulatory/security compliance. With VirtuaDesk™ workplace transformation, the client was able to provide better user experience and secured access to applications and data, ensuring regulatory compliance.

The key benefits of VirtuaDesk™ workplace transformation include:

• TCO savings of 25% delivered through latest hyper-converged technologies combined with an automation-led global service and support delivery model
• Transformation from a heterogeneous Citrix farm to a unified VirtuaDesk™ reference architecture for improved performance, availability and scalability
• Reduction in desktop provisioning time from 2-3 weeks to less than 4 hours, thereby providing more agility to business
• Reduction in VDI user incidents by over 50% in 3 months by deploying Wipro’s predictive analytics and proactive monitoring framework
• Integrated service delivery for desktop engineering, service desk and VDI as-a-service, enabling seamless transition of 10,000+ new users from physical desktop to virtual desktops so as to deliver business benefits through TCO reduction and improved security and compliance

Wipro was able to leverage the investments made in VirtuaDesk™ reference architecture with the latest technologies from our partners HPE, Microsoft and Citrix in our labs and internal implementation first, before implementing it for our client. In addition, our investments in automation of service, support and end-to-end infrastructure and user experience monitoring, helped to deliver the best possible user experience at the most optimum costs, thereby delivering workplace transformation requirements of our client  

-  Seshu Kumar GV, General Manager, Cloud & Infrastructure Services, Wipro.