During its PC refresh cycle, Fullerton India makes way for thin clients — and reaps fat rewards By Jasmine Desai
Fullerton India made a trenchant decision when its PCs were coming for a refresh cycle after roughly four years. Instead of replacing PCs with newer ones — the traditional way of doing things — it went for Citrix-based thin clients. Fullerton India Credit Company Limited is a Non-Banking Finance Company (NBFC) with over 360 branches. It offers a range of financial services. With over 5,500 employees and one million customers, the company covers over 400 towns and cities and more than 15,000 villages across India. So a hosted solution made even more sense for Fullerton, given that its distributed locations used a variety of PCs.
Says Anoop Handa, Executive Vice President – Technology & CIO, Fullerton India, “Running PCs across so many locations was never cost effective and we were on the look-out to make the whole machinery cost-effective and optimal.” In short, they wanted to manage some 2,000 endpoints more effectively. Also, since the PCs were old, users were losing on productive time due to slow response. A better user experience was in earnest need.
The trend of consumerization of IT made the vendor evaluation procedure very significant. There was always the choice of going for new desktops, but Fullerton decided to diverge from that road and selected thin-clients. The main challenge was to make a business case for establishing an innovative and new way of working at the end-points. Says Handa, “To do something in an innovative and different way calls for a lot of pre-planning and negotiations.” There are close to 3,000 desktops in our offices across India, but the focus under this implementation was for around 2,200 desktops which were getting outdated. Fullerton already shared a rapport with Citrix and had worked with the vendor on its server virtualization initiative. This implementation meant extension on the end point side as well.
Thin clients make a big entry
Any huge implementation comes with inherent hurdles. The first hurdle was on user-front. Explains Handa, “We were taking away a desktop that has built-in memory and users tend to have lot of personal items stored in it. Every PC user is given 300-400 GB of storage. With this implementation, we were limiting the amount of storage allotted to each user.” From a security and control perspective, it is convenient to have everything in a central location, but for users it is a very big change management issue.
The implementation had to be linked to business as it was a huge change program for the company altogether. A detailed assessment of the technology and implementation was done in a phased manner. The initial phase was convincing the management with benefits of going for hosted thin-client solution. The next phase was conducting a Proof Of Concept (POC) with 30 to 40 users across India, in diverse geographical locations like metros and rural areas and diverse functional roles accessing different applications. The idea behind this was to do a very comprehensive and extensive POC. The POC essentially confirmed that the technology worked across all users, applications, peripheral devices like printers, biometric devices etc. The end-user feedback helped in overcoming a lot of hurdles during the POC stage itself. It was extremely important to maintain constant communication with the business users, stakeholders and the end-users as it is a key to the success of such programs.
Fullerton India had to very carefully define job roles like power users, application specific users, users with need for larger storage among others. Thus, they had to really sieve through it properly and categorize and create images at the back-end for that particular group of users in terms of usage. It was a lengthy process requiring going to the branch to get the user backup of data on the front-end and transferring it to their profiles in the back-end. The implementation is still in continuing phase. Last month, some 600 of the thin-clients were installed. Around 40 desktops are changed on a per day basis.
Processes were instantly put in place for ease of use. There had to be proper knowledge of what applications and devices were being accessed and used across the organization and had to be documented properly. Another interesting thing was to teach users to do housekeeping. Says Handa, “Psychologically, users tend to keep their data for really long even when it is not useful anymore. We had to see how to migrate only relevant (business related) active data onto the central servers. Presently, on an average each user does not need more than 8-10 GB of storage.” Workflow systems, co-lending application, collection systems, Microsoft utilities, emails etc. are being used presently. Internal applications like HR are also being accessed on thin-clients.
The implementation required some sort of infrastructure overhaul. At the back-end, which is the centralized storage backup, Fullerton procured new Dell servers and on the front-end, it procured thin-clients. The implementation partner was Anunta Technologies which provided fully managed services. In the industry, there are lot of managed services for the back-end side, but Fullerton India utilized them for implementation and for ensuring application delivery-as-a-service on all locations. It also ensures a single point of contact for anything to do with end-user computing.
Although being mid-way in its implementation, Fullerton India has already started accruing benefits. Once the PCs started getting outdated, the organization was receiving lot of help-desk tickets for PC related issues, either for upgrade or more memory etc.
Help-desk tickets for those locations where thin-clients have been installed has gone down considerably. Today, when power has become such a valuable commodity, the organization is saving a lot on power, post implementation. During the POC itself, the power saving was around 50%. Also, with thin-clients boot up is instant, thus resulting in more productive time.
Fullerton India accumulated lot of valuable learnings during the implementation. Says Handa, “It is necessary to do the homework and carefully assess the requirements. There is no need to follow the herd. Any implementation, especially of this scale, has to be an IT-enabled business affirmation program, wherein you have to do proper planning; extensive communication, user awareness and being with users during the implementation stage is very essential.” Also, he says, any new discovery or lesson during POC should be documented.
Next on the agenda is to leverage BYOD in the next financial year. Since Fullerton India has the back-end infrastructure in place, it can be extended to a variety of end-user devices including tablets. Says Handa, “More and more organizations will be jumping onto what is termed as the ‘consumerization of IT,’ leading to the use of heterogeneous end-points.”
