About Clifton Gunderson
Clifton Gunderson, ranked as one of the nation’s largest certified public accounting and consulting firms, provides a wide range of assurance, accounting, tax, and consulting services to clients in a variety of industries. Founded in 1960, Clifton Gunderson has a staff of more than 2,000 professionals serving clients from 45 offices across the country. The firm has been recognized as one of the country’s best places to work.

The Challenge
With offices across the nation, Clifton Gunderson has made a significant investment in Citrix technology for remote access. Applications are maintained from one central location with secure access for users via Citrix Presentation Server. Citrix decreases PC related support issues, saves bandwidth, and improves response time. CG has experienced significant growth in the past year, however, they did not have an effective way to manage and control the fast growing number of servers, applications, and users.

Requirements
Clifton Gunderson’s technical environment has experienced extreme growth, doubling servers in one year to 117 Citrix Presentation Servers. These servers deliver 632 published applications and over 100 published desktops to over 2000 concurrent users. According to Kelly Svaton, Sr. Citrix Architect, this hyper growth was becoming a challenge to manage. “If we didn’t have the proper
tools to manage our Citrix environment, it would become very difficult to keep track of our application usage.” They needed a way to report on months of utilization data to help manage application licenses so that little used applications could be retired, thus saving licensing and support costs. Due to the seasonal peaks of the accounting business, CG also needed to analyze usage of their server farm to better repare for future peak periods. The productivity of employees during heavy use periods is critical; therefore effective planning is necessary to prepare for the heaviest server loads. Instead of just throwing more hardware at this problem, CG needed to find a way to redistribute resources based on historical trends.

The Solution
To address these challenges, Clifton underson selected Introspect from XTS. CG needed an enterprise class, scalable reporting solution that enabled the necessary analysis to improve application management in their Citrix farm. The fact that Introspect was plugin- play and non-intrusive to production impressed Svaton. “There were no expensive consulting services to install and we had useful reports that same day. Plus there was no impact on our farm because additional data collection agents were not necessary.”

The Results
Comments Svaton, “Before Introspect it was challenging to determine who was using our published applications in the past, what time they may have been using the application and for how long, -- let alone determining the concurrency of an application by server over extensive time periods. Now I can easily run and distribute reports, with complete control over how the data is presented. These reports show when a user was running an application and what server they were connected to. In addition, Introspect helps us determine what published applications are still being used and which ones can be removed, as well as overall concurrency of an application or server to give us a better estimate of how our resources are, and should be, allocated. For example,we could potentially reduce software
licenses by about 15% after analyzing Introspect’s peak usage reports. Even if we add a cushion, we could drop a significant number of licenses safely.”

With Introspect, Clifton Gunderson also realized the following benefits:

Reduce unused applications.
Monthly trending reports by server and users allow management to review and identify underutilized applications.

License reduction and compliance.
Licensing costs are controlled by viewing the concurrency levels of applications.

Identify peak usage periods.
Allocate resources to ensure satisfactory service levels during peak utilization periods.

Fast report generation.
Speed is important when help desk needs to determine if a current problem is the result of an ongoing trend.

Detailed usage analysis by department.
Track when users are logged on, what applications are the most frequently used, and review applications that a particular group of users access. Introspect provides CG the capability to generate billing reports.

Automated delivery saves time.
Support teams and managers for applications/silos receive reports allowing for decisions based on applications usage.

Improved resource management.
Accurately determine how to allocate resources and where to cutback or expand.

The Future
Because Introspect is driven by an analytics engine, Clifton Gunderson will continue to benefit from the potential for more advanced predictive analysis for forecasting capacity planning. CG will be more proactive in evaluating historical performance against baselines over months and even years, using that data to forecast future performance using “what-if” scenarios against those baselines. In addition CG has the option to leverage Introspect’s billing reports to charge for Citrix usage for selected user groups. Boasts Svaton, “Introspect has promoted the value of Citrix because it allows management and the business units to see historically how IT has performed versus actual usage trends. Introspect is a great product that makes managing and planning our Citrix farm easier, but more importantly, it helps us deliver
greater value to our business customers.”