Citrix Managed Services

Managing a Citrix environment is a skilled and time-consuming task.  Training and retaining the necessary skilled Citrix administration and support staff is also a significant overhead. The Centralis Managed Service offers a well established, fixed price solution.  

The Centralis Managed Service provides a simple, cost-effective way to ensure that a Citrix Farm is tuned and maintained to best practice. 

Centralis currently manages Citrix farms for some of the UK's leading private and public sector organisations.  Supporting many thousands of concurrent users, the farms benefit from pro-active maintenance which includes daily checks of every server, monthly reporting and detailed annual health checks / quality assurance reviews. 

Our costs are highly competitive because we combine highly experienced administration staff with bespoke in-house developed farm management tools.  The result is an excellent level of service at a cost which is typically 50% less than that of a fully expensed in-house team.

The Centralis Managed Service is covered by our BS EN ISO9001 quality procedures and includes unlimited technical support with escalation of any issues to Centralis award-winning consultancy team. 

	"The full outsourced service, allows us to concentrate on the running of our business with a stable IT system. We now have a solid, robust and well maintained Citrix farm, all provided for by Centralis"
	Mark James, IT Technical Services Manager, Crest Nicholson plc

The service can be applied to new deployments or existing Citrix farms following a health-check. 

The service not only provides an immediate, expert resource, it cuts the typical annual cost significantly and resolves all the key farm management challenges.  With an improvement in quality of service and a reduction in cost, the Managed Service allows the internal support teams to focus their resources on other areas. 

The Managed Service can also be used as a transition phase - helping to move a Citrix farm from project into production and ensuring that all the procedures and processes are in place before handing the service to operations.

Citrix Managed Service

The Managed Service for Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp farms has the following features:

• Ten years experience of delivering corporate managed services
• Documented best practice standards and focus on service delivery
• Unlimited, expert technical support from experienced, qualified staff
• Service backed by ISO9001 and Investors in People certification
• Daily pro-active farm maintenance and management
• Assigned technical resource from our award-winning consultancy team
• Scheduled quality assurance and strategic reviews
• Detailed call reports and SLA performance figures
• Unique farm management software included free of charge

Overall, the Centralis Managed Service is recognised by our customers as a key part of their strategic investment in Citrix technologies.  The main benefit of the service is to ensure the long-term stability, quality and performance of the server farm – which is essential to the quality of service delivered to the end-users.

∆ Top of page

Citrix Farm Management Challenges

There are a number of challenges around training and retaining a team capable of managing and supporting a strategic Citrix environment:

1. Experience
   A team managing a single farm is limited in their experience of the wider Citrix environment, particularly when faced with a significant upgrade or expansion of the service. Recruiting suitably experienced permanent staff can be difficult and expensive.
2. Training
   It is essential that the training of every team member is kept up to date through professional training courses, however this is time consuming and costly.
3. Focus
   Staff assigned to managing the Citrix environment need to have this as the principal focus of their role. It is very easy for staff to be assigned to other projects which have higher priority in the short term.
4. Staff Retention
   Most organisations face a steady turnover of technical staff, but with demand for Citrix skills growing at over 30% in 2004 (source JobStats Feb 2005) this is a particularly vulnerable area.
5. Procedures and Standards
   Centralised environments demand the highest quality documented procedures and standards.  Developing these from scratch is difficult and very time-consuming.
6. Cost
   Centralis estimates the fully expensed annual cost of training and retaining an effective internal Citrix support and farm management team, including a typical 3rd party Citrix support contract, to be just under £3,000 per server for enterprise solutions and as high as £8,000 per server for smaller deployments¹.

Benefits of a Citrix Managed Service

A Managed Services contract from Centralis resolves all these issues - our staff are highly experienced and fully trained.  Their focus is purely on providing this service to our customers - and retention of staff is taken care of by us.  We already have all the documented procedures and standards in place, they just need tailoring for each customers environment.  With regards to the cost, we are confident that we can offer significant savings against any fully-costed internal service.

1 (Figures are based on a typical salary for a systems administrator of £33,000 (IT JobsWatch 2005) weighted by 50% for standard overheads plus 20% for specialist training and recruitment costs.

∆ Top of page