Citrix Solution helps boost five star hospitality

Radisson SAS currently operates 130 hotels in 37 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with another 30 projects under development. The Citrix Access Information now centralized by the RadissonSAS I.T operations in Dubai Media City, allows instant application deployment, access to legacy applications and on-line support to increase employee productivity and reduce overall IT costs.

As is the hallmark in the hospitality business, Customer Service is the cornerstone in the growth and development of the RadissonSAS Hotels internationally. Their "Yes I Can" spirit of service ensures 100% Guest Satisfaction Guarantee with a first class hotel brand. Essentially, providing the right information at the right time and place is very critical to the employees. After extensive analysis, The RadissonSAS Hotel decided to implement Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server to streamline and centralize access protocols and applications which had been on multiple networks. By deploying MetaFrame across its network, RadissonSAS looks to take advantage of the scalability, manageability and high availability features provided by the Citrix solution.

Post deployment, the results were almost immediate. RadissonSAS's 'front-line' employees could immediately access back office applications directly from their desktop PCs quickly and effectively. Managers noted a doubling of employee productivity.

"We did not have to rip and replace any part of our existing infrastructure during deployment which safeguarded our prior technology investments, and at the same time, were able to raise employee performance rates by a huge margin," said Fraidy Pinto, Regional Manager IT, Rezidor SAS (RadissonSAS).

"End-user access to applications was difficult to manage, and support was a tedious
exercise. We had two LANs with separate serial connections that end-users utilized to access mission critical applications that ran on multiple operating systems ranging from Linux, Novell, Windows and other POS systems. These in turn were accessed through multiple TCP/IP protocols, all of which reduced performance and manageability."

Solutions Middle East, a Gold Citrix Solutions Advisor in the region and a reputed solutions provider, worked closely with the RadissonSAS team to implement the solution at the RadissonSAS Resort in Sharjah. "The expertise provided by Solutions Middle East during the installation was of invaluable help to us and we look forward to a long and continued relationship with them in our future ventures," commented Fraidy Pinto. "We can now strictly control what end-users can and cannot access by customizing and providing them with accessibility levels through their passwords. This will help us maintain bandwidth efficiency levels by preventing the use of 'heavy' applications at the desktop level and unproductive use of the Internet."

"This was truly one of the simple and quick implementations we have carried out," commented Minosh Salam, Product Manager - Enterprise Access Solutions at Solution Middle East, Dubai. "We deployed two servers to make sure we had no load balancing issues and that backups were always available on either server if one went off-line."

The RadissonSAS IT Dept. along with Fraidy Pinto and other corporate team members were involved in the implementation of Metaframe XP Presentation Server which was completed with minimum downtime. An 'Application Access Layer' made up of two Citrix Servers at each site, was installed between RadissonSAS legacy applications and some 150 clients across 3 locations. End-users now connect through one unified protocol on a virtual private network (VPN) to access relevant information on applications such as Fidelio and Scala, as well as Microsoft Office applications. All applications accessed at the clients' side actually run on the servers to save valuable memory space and reduce support issues. Network administrators are enabled to access client PCs for any support or upgrade related issues. The Citrix 'application access layer' made it possible to secure the VPN architecture while at the same time making manageability and scalability centralized.

End-user technical support, which was a serious resource drainer, has now become a straight forward process. "Our technical support professionals can now shadow end-users remotely to solve any issues and can deploy security patches and software upgrade instantaneously across the whole network, regardless of geographical location," said Pinto. "We have seen support calls drop dramatically since we deployed Citrix MetaFrame, which had immediate effects on our technology costs."

After the successful Citrix MetaFrame installation, the RadissonSAS I.T team intends to extend the solution to incorporate all news desktop requirements which come as a result of business growth and new hires. The solution will also incorporate any new RadissonSAS developments in the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.