Case Study: Telecom Italia achieves cost savings and rapid desktop provisioning with Citrix XenDesktop

Telecom firm cuts costs, speeds provisioning, by using desktop virtualization

Telecom Italia, Italy’s largest telecommunications provider with more than 71,000 employees and millions of fixed and mobile lines, faced a costly IT refresh and support problem: 20,000 aging desktops, high annual maintenance (€180 per call-center PC), remote dealers that cost €300 per desk per year to support, slow five-day provisioning for new dealer computers, frequent software-distribution failures, and many employees using two PCs for security reasons.

The company implemented a Microsoft–Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (Hyper-V, System Center, and Citrix XenDesktop with HDX) and moved to thin clients and centrally managed virtual machines. The change cut hardware and maintenance costs (about €250 saved per thin client, €2.5M in hardware savings and roughly €3M annual dealer-support savings), halved power use, reduced provisioning time to one-fifth (from five days to one day), achieved 100% software-deployment success, improved security and user experience, and enabled a faster Windows 7 migration as it rolled out thousands of virtual desktops through 2010–2011.

Telecom Italia

Carlo Filangieri

Head of IT Infrastructure