Case Study: Nissan Motor Company achieves high-performance global 3D CAD R&D with Citrix XenDesktop

Nissan powers high-performance R&D worldwide with Citrix XenDesktop

Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., pursuing its VITESSE IT strategy to boost global R&D efficiency, needed to increase CAD productivity for engineers across 16 global sites. Centralizing CAD/PDM data in Japan promised real-time collaboration, but long download times and the cost/complexity of splitting databases made that impractical—so Nissan explored virtual desktop infrastructure to give distributed teams fast, secure access to 3D CAD tools.

Nissan implemented a virtual desktop solution using Citrix XenDesktop and XenServer with NVIDIA GRID K2, running Siemens NX, and iteratively tuned the system with engineers and vendor partners. After pilot tuning and user scenario testing, the service launched in North America (July 2015) and the U.K. (Oct 2015), delivering centralized data management, improved responsiveness, stronger security, lower client hardware costs, and seamless cross-location productivity, with plans to expand to additional R&D sites.

Nissan Motor Company

Satoshi Kitsuki

Engineering IS Department, Global IS Division