Case Study
team.blue
focus on automation, their ethos is that engineering teams should not be needed for day to day operations. Customers should self-serve, or at worst the helpdesk should be able to manage – no escalations for admin tasks! With that ethos Team.blue have invested heavily into Automation and into Atria:
- Automation for deploying and managing capacity in Citrix Farms
- Automation for end user management with Atria
- Automation for billing from Atria into invoicing systems
Details
Compay Name: team.blue
Date: March 2020
Website: www.team.blue
team.blue is one of the largest hosting companies operating in Europe. They have a range of brands offering localised and value differentiated solutions to their customers and resellers.
Two of the brands offer Desktop as a service leveraging the Citrix Workspace Solutions – ScanNet direct to customers, and Curanet through a reseller channel. Both of these are managed through the same Atria instance – keeping customer management consistent.
The Challenge
In March 2020, ScanNet had an urgent call for a customer – they needed a core transactional business application (ERP) hosted – urgently!
This new customer was large, in fact the largest DaaS customer the ScanNet business would have, and the user count had the potential to be very high, approximately 3,000 users.
The deal was dependent on being able to deliver quickly, there was no time for a protracted deployment project.
"Scalability and flexibility are two keywords for us as a Hosting provider and for our customers. Atria is a major key piece in our desktop platform that has proven in production that it can scale up and down as needed in every area."
Tommy B. Møller – Systems Architect at team.blue
The deal was dependent on being able to deliver quickly, there was no time for a protracted deployment project.
The Solution
Due to the Team.blue investment in automation they were able to deliver. With automated scripting kicked off for scaling up the Desktop as a Service infrastructure the environment was ready to go in ½ a day. The same Automation script used Atria’s API to create the customer in the multi-tenant environment ready for use.
Having Atria for user management meant that when the infrastructure was available, access to Atria was handed over to the customer, and they were able to provision and manage their own users, immediately provisioning the initial 150 users.
The customer was so impressed with how easy it was to create users in Atria, and the quality of service delivered by ScanNet that they continued to grow. The initial order of 150 users grew to over 300 within days and peaked at 3,200 users. Using the bulk import functionality of Atria made it simple and easy to grow the user count fast – without errors.
During this whole process level 3 engineering wasn’t required. The processes and automation kicked in – behaving exactly as it should.
"Because we could react that fast (and yes they were surprised! ), the order quickly increased to 300-400 users. The expansion was again done within a day from our end, because the control panel was in place, we just added more servers to the pool with our own engine."
Tommy B. Møller – Systems Architect at team.blue
Benefit
Having invested in Atria meant that Team.blue could scale when they needed to, by combining their own infrastructure automation with Atria delivers a 1-click deployment solution, ready for customers and resellers to use.
Using the Atria portal for user management meant that the customer could add their own users at their own pace, not consuming the Team.blue helpdesk and engineering resources.
Bringing these two together meant onboarding the new customer was fast, (only 1 day) and seamless – winning a deal that most other MSP’s would have struggled to deliver.
Result
Won Team.blues largest desktop customer From order to go live was less than a day with:
- A fully functional control panel so the customer could start creating users.
- A fully functional desktop platform where users could login.
- Because delivery was so quick, the initial order grew from 150 users to over 300 almost immediately and has ended at being 2,465 users with 1,770 desktops.
- The customer self-provisioned 3,200 users using Atria at the peak – with no issues.
- Due to the urgency the customer over provisioned but things calmed down they could search for users who never activated, and deprovision them – saving them money.
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