Case Study: Sky achieves 90-second boot times, greater resilience and reduced carbon footprint with Citrix XenApp

Sky believes in better for its contact centres

Sky, a major UK and Ireland pay-TV and broadband provider serving over 11.5 million homes and handling more than 60 million contact-centre calls a year, needed to replace Windows XP across its internal contact centres. With 300,000 training hours invested annually and priorities on user experience, rapid capacity scaling, robust disaster recovery and reducing carbon impact, the Work Place Technology team evaluated whether to refresh PCs or adopt an alternative desktop approach.

Sky deployed Wyse thin clients running only its VOIP phone client and used Citrix XenApp to deliver a common published desktop, plus a custom HTML logon to simplify the user journey. Rolled out to 5,000 operators, the new platform boots to the CRM in 90 seconds (about 600% faster), requires minimal retraining, enables easy hot-desking, improves licensing control and security, and provides resilient, multi–data-centre disaster recovery. The low‑power devices and efficient virtual backend have also cut carbon footprint and cooling costs while boosting productivity and flexibility.

Sky

Gareth MacGuire

Head of Platforms and Engineering Manager