Heidelberger Druckmaschinen

Global Manufacturer Reduces Computer Costs by Simplifying Application Management

The world’s leading manufacturer of sheet-fed offset printing press systems, Heidelberg relies on thousands of personal computers to help its employees to work as productively as possible in a highly competitive industry. As part of a companywide initiative to unify, manage, and regularly update the personal computer environment, Heidelberg wanted to ease a planned migration to the Windows Vista® operating system, manage computers more efficiently, and reduce the cost and time associated with application delivery and management. The company deployed Microsoft® Application Virtualization to deliver applications as services and manage personal computer environments throughout the enterprise. Using the new technology, Heidelberg reduced application packaging time more than 50 percent, realized a 40 percent cost savings, empowered its IT staff, and accelerated application repair processes.

 

Situation

In the print media industry, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg) is the world’s leading manufacturer of sheet-fed offset printing press systems, software, and consumables, with a market share of more than 40 percent. Heidelberg offers the largest manufacturing and support network in the industry, with 18 manufacturing sites and 250 support centers worldwide. Headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, the company employs 18,000 people in 170 countries and serves more than 200,000 commercial and industrial customers around the world.

With Application Virtualization we dramatically reduced packaging time, optimized application delivery and management processes, and cut the total cost of ownership for our client environment. Axel Junghans Global Client Manager, Heidelberg

The printing equipment industry is highly competitive, and Heidelberg has to operate as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible to maintain its market leadership. The company relies on IT systems, including thousands of personal computers, to help its employees manage information and be more productive. By 2001, the company was managing more than 100 separate models of personal computers and scores of applications. “It was a disparate environment and costly to maintain,” says Axel Junghans, Global Client Manager at Heidelberg.

To help gain control over its personal computer infrastructure and reduce costs, the company embarked on an initiative to review the hardware, software, and processes related to desktop delivery and management, and unify the personal computer environment. The initiative—called the Heidelberg Client—also included leasing hardware and refreshing the personal computer environment every three years. Heidelberg wanted to drastically reduce the number of hardware models, operating systems, and applications that the IT department supported, and offer users a standard desktop image to ease companywide communication.

Heidelberg first consolidated the number of personal computer models to 12 and standardized all computers on the Windows® 2000 operating system. Three years later it upgraded to Windows XP and Microsoft® Office 2003. When it came time to refresh the computer environment again in 2007, the company decided to migrate to Windows Vista® Enterprise, Microsoft Office Professional 2007, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 , so that it could provide its employees with a collaborative environment that was easy to use and offered more security tools.

Although Heidelberg had made progress unifying its personal computer environment, including standardizing on 180 applications enterprisewide, the company was still under pressure to reduce costs. IT was packaging applications in MSI files and delivering them with Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003. If errors occurred during the installation on a particular computer, IT staff would receive notification, and then often have to go to the computer, find the cause of the problem, and try to correct it. If IT couldn’t fix the problem within one hour, it would generally have to reinstall the software to the computer, which would take about two hours. If IT determined that there was a problem with the overall packaging, it would have to repackage the software and deliver it to many affected computers.

“We would have to find every client in the global user base that had the problem application,” says Jorg Manske, who is responsible for software packaging and delivery for Global Desktop Management at Heidelberg. “It could easily take two weeks.”

Heidelberg wanted to manage computers more efficiently, cut costs and time from software delivery and management, and ease the migration to Windows Vista. “We knew that many of our existing applications would not run on Windows Vista, and for those that could, MSI-based packaging could still be time-consuming and wouldn’t work in 100 percent of the cases,” says Manske.

Solution

As part of the third Heidelberg Client refresh and update, the company was interested in adopting Microsoft Application Virtualization, a solution in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance. Because Application Virtualization didn’t require installing software on individual computers, Heidelberg recognized that it could use the technology to reduce application deployment costs, deliver applications as services, and better manage and control personal computer environments throughout the enterprise.

In the past we needed 2.5 full-time staff to handle packaging, but now we only need 1.5 full-time people. And because it is so much easier than traditional MSI packaging, we’ll probably be able to handle it with even fewer resources in the future. Jorg Manske Software Packaging and Delivery, Global Desktop Management, Heidelberg

“We were really happy that Microsoft chose this virtualization technology,” says Junghans. “When Microsoft integrated it with the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, we realized that we could purchase the technology through our Enterprise Agreement license at a very reasonable cost, and we decided to try it for the new Heidelberg Client.”

The IT staff spent four weeks evaluating whether Application Virtualization could meet the company’s requirements. During the testing, Heidelberg tried virtualizing SAP software, a critical application for the company. “The success of the SAP virtualization project proved to us that we could virtualize key applications and run them on Windows Vista in the Heidelberg Client,” says Junghans.

After the initial evaluation, it took just eight weeks to deploy the Application Virtualization infrastructure. Participating in the Microsoft Technology Adopters Program, Heidelberg began its deployment with Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) 4.2, and then moved to the App-V 4.5 beta. Using Systems Management Server 2003, the company deployed the App-V 4.5 agent to 15,000 computers in more than 70 countries. Heidelberg quickly virtualized approximately 90 applications, 50 percent of its globally-used, standard programs. Ultimately, the company expects to virtualize at least 80 percent of its applications.

Heidelberg IT staff use the Microsoft Application Virtualization Sequencer, a wizard-based tool, to package each application. Because 7,000 Heidelberg employees—50 percent of the company’s workforce—are mobile and need to work remotely, IT wanted to provide users with the complete client. Rather than streaming portions of each application’s code to each computer’s cache, Heidelberg pre-loaded the cache of the machines with all the applications assigned to the user. “By pre-loading the applications, we avoided sending such a large load of applications over the network,” says Junghans.

When a user needs a new application or when upgrades and updates are available, IT virtualizes the software and sends it on-demand via the network to the client cache, and the user launches it by clicking on the appropriate icon. IT configures its virtualized applications for all users to time out after 90 days, which helps ensure that users will reconnect to the network and get updated software. The company is also beginning to decentralize the sequencing process to enable IT staff in local offices to virtualize and deploy software that is specific to their users.

Heidelberg plans to upgrade from Systems Management Server 2003 to Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2, and integrate the product with Application Virtualization, which will help it further streamline virtualized application delivery and management.

Benefits

Its evaluation and initial deployment processes proved that Heidelberg could run applications on the Heidelberg Client using Application Virtualization, and make most of its business-critical applications available on Windows Vista. However, the company quickly realized other benefits including a 50 percent reduction in application packaging time and 40 percent reduction in costs. The new virtualized application environment has also empowered local IT staff, accelerated application repair, and reduced downtime.

 “With Application Virtualization we dramatically reduced packaging time, optimized application delivery and management processes, and cut the total cost of ownership for our client environment. It paid for itself in just six months,” says Junghans.

40 Percent Cost Savings

Not only is Heidelberg packaging global applications faster, it is doing so with less dedicated packaging staff in corporate IT. “In the past we needed 2.5 full-time staff to handle packaging, but now we only need 1.5 full-time people,” says Manske. “And because it is so much easier than traditional MSI packaging, we’ll probably be able to handle it with even fewer resources in the future.”

Heidelberg estimates that it saves more than U.S.$65,000 (Euro €50,000) annually in packaging costs. This represents a 40 percent savings over traditional MSI-based packaging. In addition, there is no rollout and no deployment costs for virtualized applications. “There’s no need to dedicate a rollout manager. It’s very easy and cost-effective,” says Manske.

We don’t have to do any integration tests because virtualized applications have no impact on other applications. This enables us to deliver applications to the field in half the time it used to take. Axel Junghans, Global Client Manager, Heidelberg

50 Percent Time Savings

It took Heidelberg IT an average of five days to package an application with MSI. Using Application Virtualization, IT can accomplish the same task in just two days, a time savings of more than 50 percent. Much of this is due to the elimination of lengthy quality assurance testing. “We don’t have to do any integration tests because virtualized applications have no impact on other applications,” says Junghans. “This enables us to deliver applications to the field in half the time it used to take. This is very important because when we create a package we plan to maintain it for at least three years, so we need to be able to easily update it and apply hot fixes. With Microsoft Application Virtualization, it is very simple and fast to package and deploy applications and updates.”

Junghans expects that the new Dynamic Suite Composition capability in App-V 4.5 will enable Heidelberg to virtualize more applications. With Dynamic Suite Composition, Heidelberg will allow virtual applications to share resources such as middleware, plug-ins, and data, all in the same virtual environment. “With App-V 4.5 we can control the relationship between virtualized applications that need to interact,” says Junghans. “Without this capability, we would probably choose traditional MSI packaging and installation for applications that need to talk to each other. But moving forward, we’ll be able to use this capability to virtualize more applications.”

Empowered Local IT Staff

Heidelberg is also empowering IT staff in regional offices to virtualize applications for local employees. “The knowledge you need to create a virtualized package is 10 times less than what you need to create an MSI package,” says Manske. “Local employees who weren’t able to package applications in MSI can sequence virtual applications after receiving less than one day of training.” This will enable Heidelberg’s central IT staff to offload application packaging and maintenance to the local offices, and will help the company virtualize more applications quickly. “This will increase the number of virtualized packages to over 300, which will save money in the local support area,” says Manske.

Accelerated Application Repair

Heidelberg hasn’t experienced any errors during installation and has built a highly stable and reliable Application Virtualization environment. This is particularly important when local staff is involved in packaging and deployment. “It’s really astounding since it’s a new technology for us. In the last six months, I have received only one helpdesk ticket related to this technology,” says Manske. “In the past, deploying a complex package could result in about 100 tickets.”

If the company does experience problems with virtualized applications, it resolves them easily and quickly. Instead of taking two weeks to find and fix a problem on all the affected clients, it can take just two hours with virtualized applications. “It’s very easy to solve errors such as missing links from extensions to applications, or wrong shortcut names,” says Manske. “I just change the shortcut and upload it to the server, and when the users click on the desktop icon they get the refreshed application.”

Windows Vista

Windows Vista can help your organization use information technology to gain a competitive advantage in today’s new world of work. Your people will be able to find and use information more effectively. You will be able to support your mobile work force with better access to shared data and collaboration tools. And your IT staff will have better tools and technologies to enhance corporate IT security, data protection, and more efficient deployment and management. For more information about Windows Vista, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsvista  

 

For More Information

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For more information about Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.heidelberg.com