Case Study: Kelly Group reduces IT maintenance costs and enables flexible, mobile working with Citrix

The Kelly Group reduces IT maintenance costs with virtual computing

The Kelly Group, a South African parent company providing staffing, workforce management and skills development across 75 offices (and operations in the USA), needed to deliver high-performance, flexible “work from anywhere” IT while cutting maintenance costs. With more than 600 office-based and 200 mobile users, the IT team faced the challenge of managing static desktop images and dispersed systems that limited collaboration, reliability and administration efficiency.

Working with Integr8 IT, Kelly Group implemented a Citrix virtual computing platform (XenDesktop, XenServer, XenApp and Receiver) to centralize OS, applications and data in the group data centre, consolidating servers from 40 to 8 and enabling secure access from any device. Administration and updates are now automated and faster, helpdesk calls fell from ~7–8k to ~1.2–1.6k per month, and IT maintenance costs dropped by about R2.5 million in the last year (R7.5 million over three years), while employee flexibility, application performance and inter-office collaboration all improved.

Kelly Group

André Gross

Group Infrastructure Manager