CRN met with Ricci Danieletto, managing director of Sydney MSP Applaud, and Phil Hurley, CIO of Healthe Care, for a deep dive into this multi-state Citrix deployment
CRN Ricci, what’s Applaud’s background with Healthe Care?
Ricci In 2007, we had been engaged by Unisys, who in turn were engaged by Dell to provide the service desk. But someone at either Dell or Unisys didn’t set up the service desk facility in time for the go-live, so they contacted us in a rather desperate state, asking us if we could set up our service desk quite quickly. Being a lot more nimble and dynamic, we had the facility to set up very quickly.
From there, it just rolled into a sub-contracted arrangement.
We’re here to talk about the Citrix deployment. What were the drivers behind the move to Citrix?
Phil The motivation around Citrix was in terms of the strategy to migrate from Windows XP and Office 2003 – how we were going to undertake that migration, while at the same time dealing with the challenges of mobility, as well as a major fleet upgrade in terms of desktop computers.
Did you look at other options to deal with the end of XP?
Phil The other option was to do what we had always done: to run a full-blown desktop. We would have had to develop an image for 850 PCs – we run Dell Latitude laptops and Dell OptiPlex desktops – and taken the traditional deployment approach. The duration would probably have been six months.
What was Applaud’s role in this?
Ricci When you looked at some of the challenges that Phil outlined and also the nature of the Healthe Care business model, moving to a private cloud Citrix environment was a no-brainer.
The challenge that we encountered was that Citrix was a bit of a dirty word because prior to this, a pilot had been attempted and it didn’t go very well. We realised if we could get over that hurdle and reposition the technology, the customer would benefit exponentially.
How did you overcome the challenges of the previous pilot?
Ricci I think we took a more premeditated approach, not a “let’s just roll it out and see what happens”. We took a commercial view and we worked with Phil to build the business case. Citrix was quite instrumental in helping us do that. Then after that business case, we decided on [another] pilot.
We were fortunate because we were already the incumbent managed services provider so we had a really good opportunity to benchmark the existing user experience. We rolled out the pilot at one of the sites, and we benchmarked the user experience post-implementation of Citrix.
The results were extremely compelling as far as performance was concerned. In addition to some of the other benefits that Phil and his team would have inherited, the fact that performance was actually better was a bonus.
What technology is running in the virtual environment?
Phil All the business applications, CSC patient administration product webPAS and Oracle financials. Also a rostering product, RosterOn.
Ricci Also the Microsoft productivity stack. But the webPAS is the jewel in the crown, because that’s the front-of-house system.
What were some of the specific challenges?
Ricci Some of the technical stumbling blocks we came across were around enabling a plethora of devices in the same environment. More recently, the Chromebook was quite challenging for us.
One of the key reasons why we didn’t encounter a lot of technical difficulty while deploying the applications was the approach we used with the Citrix designers, which was that we took a layered methodology approach.
That ensures some key and unique applications will work in the environment and it helps by packaging them individually in bubble wrap, so to speak.
I believe this also offered some savings in terms of an upcoming device refresh?
Phil Yes. Typically, we would spend something like $950 for a Dell OptiPlex desktop, whereas a thin client is $420. Throw on a Citrix licence on top to make sure we’re comparing apples with apples – so $250 on there – but probably saving, all up, $350 per desktop.
We’re also able to extend the life of that fleet by an additional two years. A thin client arguably lasts for seven years, whereas we would have had a strategy of doing a three-year manufacturer warranty plus one year, so you get an extra three years life out of [a thin client].
And because they’re relatively inexpensive, we can afford to maintain a stock of spares, so instead of a 10-day turnaround from placing an order, we just walk to the cupboard and swap it out.
What’s Applaud’s background in these types of projects?
Ricci From the day we opened the doors, Citrix was our first partnership – even before HP or Microsoft. We’ve been a Citrix partner for a long time – nine-and-a-half years.
What are the challenges with a move to virtual desktops?
Phil There’s the fact that you have to be connected in order for it to work, so that occasionally becomes an issue.
It’s pushed our need to get full-building WiFi happening, but it’s more of an issue when people are on planes.
Ricci It’s a very small segment of the user base, but it’s quite an influential segment and that’s why you can’t ignore it.
With the device refresh, will you stick with the Dell devices?
Phil Yes.
You also mentioned Chromebooks and iPads…
Phil With the Chromebook, we’ve got a number of activities where they’re suitable. For instance, we have maybe six hospitals that have rehabilitation where there’s a swimming pool or gymnasium, and we’ve got physiotherapists and occupational therapists who need the portability of a computing device. It costs $370 for a Chromebook and you can just walk down to JB Hi-Fi and buy one.
Tell us about the backbone infrastructure.
Ricci The customer has got two data centres, both of which are in Melbourne. The underlying hypervisor or virtualisation engine is vSphere. It is predominantly Dell PowerEdge server infrastructure and EqualLogic storage solutions.
Phil [The two data centres are]Interactive in Port Melbourne and Metronode at Derrimut.
What are some of the other advantages of this switch to virtual desktops? I think you mentioned some staff were keen to get rid of their laptops…
Phil That has been very pleasing because it contributes to the total cost of ownership equation, instead of a $1,600 laptop.
Ricci And they’re more costly to maintain. The harsh reality is that laptops are a higher cost item to maintain than a PC, so it’s a dual-pronged benefit.
Phil Also, our ability to respond to diversity. We had one guy who walked in with a MacBook Air and said, “Can I connect with this?” and we said, “Sure, not a problem”.
Ricci Healthe Care’s strategy is around acquisition. We talked about this conceptually in the very early days – “Hey, if you take over a hospital, you’re getting rid of all their PCs, you’re sweeping in with another fleet of PCs, you’re having to configure [standard operating environments] for those PCs, and then you can turn on the applications”. But if you take over a hospital post-Citrix, you basically point them to a URL and it’s accessing your financials and your patient administration systems.
That was great conceptually, but when we actually switched it on for the first acquisition post the Citrix project, we were quite pleased with how easy it was for the customer.
Phil In 2012, we acquired both Hurstville Private and Mayo Private in Taree. In the past, we would have had a rip-and-replace strategy for the standard operating environment, desktops and laptops, but we’ve been able to defer that to probably later this year. Needless to say, the benefit is not only the speed but also the cost of acquisition.
Can you tell us about the timeline of the Citrix rollout?
Phil It started in July 2012.
Ricci We spent a good four months just reseeding the opportunity. I think Phil understood the potential benefits of the project, but we needed to invest a serious amount of time and effort in building a business case and also building something tangible that Phil could take back to the business.
Phil We did a pilot at our smallest hospital. The business case was conditional on the outcome of that pilot. It ran from July to September and then we started with a rollout strategy in November 2012. Today, we’ve completed all but two sites.
Ricci There was a hiatus in the middle of that for the expansion and upgrade of the data centres, so we paused the project so that the customer could invest in their core computing infrastructure. Once that was completed, we reinitiated it.
Phil The expected benefits may not have arisen from a timeliness point of view: we could have rolled out a traditional fat client on Windows 7 in probably the same time. We will really see the benefit next year when we’ll likely migrate everything up to Office 2013.
What other future benefits will you see?
Phil We’re now substantially in a position to function in a private cloud environment, which leads us to 2016 when we have to make some major capital investments in the data centres that we operate. We would look at an infrastructure-as-a-service provider to deliver that to us on an opex model rather than a capex model.
Ricci That is absolutely the journey that we’re seeing most of our customers going on. They come from this traditional IT model, and then they move to a private cloud environment; then they take a look at their private cloud environment and they understand what can be commoditised and what can be ‘cloud-ised’.
Are you saying you could ultimately move to a public cloud provider?
Ricci Maybe not all of it, because there may be some data sovereignty or application sovereignty issues, but a good portion of it.
Phil Typically, we would look for an Australian-based provider, but we don’t want to limit ourselves to that.
To wrap up, I’d like to ask about your thoughts on outsourced providers. How many do you use?
Phil We use Datamini for telephony and comms. They’re a Telstra dealer that provides data cabling, PABX support, and mobile phone support and supply. There’s a group called CRB which provides data communication, and they manage our contract with Nextgen Networks. And we use Dataweave for all things Oracle.
Ricci We as a business try to make a point of maintaining very intimate relationships with our customers. Phil and I will talk at any time that Phil needs. The reality is that we’re a tier two MSP and systems integrator; I think that an additional, tangible benefit that Phil gets through working with an organisation like ours is that his company gets access to the MD and the senior tech guys.
Phil We’re also a tier two company. What you don’t want to be is the number one client for a vendor, but you also don’t want to be number 100, so we’re in that sweet spot where if we bark, we get a response.
But I’m highly confident that if we went to a tier one managed services player, we wouldn’t get the same level of intimacy with the business. We’d be constantly talking about whether this is inside or outside of scope, where they would measure their success by getting within the service level agreement by five minutes, as opposed to what needs to be responded to immediately or in three days’ time.
I’m sure that when troops at our sites ring the service desk, they would have the perception they’re talking to a Healthe Care employee.
When I get feedback from people on the desk, it’s on a first-name basis. I don’t think there’s been any marriage proposals yet, though.
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