Thin’s Light on Costs

Subscriber growth for cellular ser-vice providers comes with many challenges
today. Ensuring customer care is one of them.

About two years ago, Hutchison felt that the pressure was mounting on its
customer care application as its subscriber base began to grow somewhat
phenomenally.

That was the time when Hutchison was setting up a new call center at Delhi,
to service the calls received from its customers in the metro. Besides, it also
wanted to take care of the applications available to many outsourced call
centers in the northern region and to the company’s network of dealers and
distributors. Most of them operated in a low-bandwidth environment.

“The key criteria were automatic failover, redundancy and load-sharing, in which Citrix scored high” Arvind Pandey, V-P, (information services), HutchisonÂ

After some deliberation, the company became clear about the approach: it
needed to reduce bandwidth requirement and do its optimum utilization.

Hutchison felt that the 200-plus call center agents at its new facility would
not require a full-fledged desktop, as only standard applications needed to be
run on these machines. That tilted the decision in favor of thin clients.

Now Hutchison wanted a solution to deploy the applications on those thin
clients. That’s when it decided to use the Citrix MetaFrame Presentation
Server. The company considered another option: Windows Terminal Server. However,
according to Arvind Pandey, vice-president (information services) at Hutchison,
"The key criteria that we had were automatic fail over, redundancy and
load-sharing, in which Citrix scored high."

The Implementation

Using Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server, the company deployed BSCS billing
solution, a customized customer care solution and many other browser-based
applications across six dual-processor Intel servers. The implementation took
merely four to six weeks time. As part of the overall implementation, Compaq T20
was chosen for the 200 thin clients, apart from high-end SMP Xeon servers.

The idea was to have all the mission-critical applications to be live 24
hours a day. With the use of Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server, Hutch was
able to do load-balancing, automatic failover and many other management tasks
critical to the smooth running of their operations.

Cost Savings

The thin client solution based on Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server has
proved to be very cost effective for Hutchison, as the cost differential of a
thin client machine compared to a full-fledged desktop worked out to almost $543–immediately
translating into a cost saving of $108,695. Besides this, the company’s
savings on bandwidth costs–cost otherwise incurred on high-bandwidth
connectivity to outsourced call centers and the dealer network–have been to
the tune of $217,391 per annum.

Deepak Kumar in New Delhi

Souma Das, managing director, Citrix India, on what telcos can achieve through deployment of Citrix solutions:

Increase profits and build customer loyalty: Applications can be
quickly deployed, easily web-enabled, and securely delivered to any device over
any connection. This enables improved customer service, reduce operating costs
and maximize cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Protect information and software assets: Citrix solutions help protect
the information and software assets against theft and viruses by locking them
down on server instead of allowing them to be exposed on desktop or portable
computers

Quicker expansion: Telcos can rapidly deploy and upgrade customer care
applications to geographically distributed call centers from a central location.
Enterprise applications, including ERP or CRM, can also be deployed to a mobile
workforce with reliable performance to help maximize operational efficiency and
reduce internal costs