A.T.U. refits its service center IT with IGEL

The German market leader in car servicing is centralizing the IT in its service centers and moving to thin client solutions from IGEL. A.T.U will convert 4,000 store PCs into thin clients in order to stagger the total spend in the desktop area and protect its existing investment.

More than 20 million customers visit the stores of A.T.U Auto-Teile-Unger each year. There are now 650 branches of the company in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Italy and Switzerland. A.T.U is introducing a new store solution, which will be provided efficiently from the data center, in order to ensure a consistent view of customers in every branch and to provide a more individually tailored service. In parallel, the car service provider will streamline the computer infrastructure and move away from its PC architecture.

Clearance sale: All PCs must go

Up to 2008, the stores operated by the company from Weiden, Germany (Upper Palatinate) were using PC-based workstations with Oracle Forms. Sales Director at A.T.U Manfred Gerlach states that the high administration costs and poor scalability were the reasons for moving away from the PC. "The high overhead and the need to manage and administer different PC generations and images did not fit with either our growth objectives or our efforts to fundamentally optimize the store processes." If nothing else, according to Gerlach, replacing defective or obsolete PC hardware pushed up the support costs within their extensive store network. Added to this were the unnecessarily high electricity costs of 500,000 Euro a year, largely due to the fact that the 4,000 store PCs had to keep running overnight in order to back up the store data. The need for optimization was also an issue in head office: "The PCs at the offices were frequently underutilized. At some desks, up to three devices could be in use at the same time to run different applications."

IGEL thin clients for centralized store IT

As a way out of the cost trap, the car service provider, with a workforce of some 12,000 employees, decided to migrate its IT consistently from 2006 onwards to server-based computing and to replace all PCs with thin clients from the German manufacturer IGEL Technology. All data and applications were successively centralized in the process with the help of Citrix Presentation Server™ and/or XenApp™. The standard applications run on 190 blade servers in the company's own data center in Weiden, while the store application Microsoft® Dynamics AX 2009, which is still being rolled out, will be hosted on 45 blade servers from the high-availability data center of TUI Infotech in Hanover. All stores opened after 2007 were already equipped with IGEL thin clients and until the final conversion to Microsoft® Dynamics AX 2009 has been completed, the old store solution can still be accessed temporarily via a local Citrix® server. However, these stores will also be connected directly to the data center by mid 2011.

Gentle migration with IGEL software

Owing to a shift in company strategy in 2007, which brought the focus away from expansion towards consolidation of the business, no new thin clients were acquired for the stores. Any, as yet, unreplaced PCs continued to run initially as Windows® computers, which on one hand accessed the old store servers with Oracle Forms and also the central Citrix server farm via an ICA client. "At the beginning of 2009, we came up with the idea to convert the fat clients to the IGEL Linux operating system so that we could manage them centrally like a physical thin client", reports Bernhard Panzer, Team Leader for Networks/Servers. "Initial tests were promising and IGEL therefore went ahead and developed the conversion software, which we piloted and ultimately used in order to continue our desktop migration with considerably lower investment costs." The software developed initially for A.T.U has since been marketed by IGEL under the name IGEL Universal Desktop Converter. "Our UDC software converts x86-compatible PCs as well as thin clients from different manufacturers to an IGEL thin client that can be fully administered remotely", explains Markus Steinkamp, Key Account Manager for Retail at IGEL Technology. "Our customers can make their existing PCs ready for the future right now and continue to operate them with far lower support costs. A quarter of the total number of 4,000 store PCs have been converted to date. Sales Director Manfred Gerlach sees this as a considerable cost advantage because a UDC license, starting from just 29 Euro, is only a fraction of the price of a physical thin client. "Thanks to the software solution from IGEL, we can stagger the total spend on the company-wide migration over a longer time frame. The PC hardware is largely depreciated and we can perform the conversion easily and economically."

Hardware-neutral and POS-compatible

Apart from staggering the investment, the gradual desktop migration offers yet another advantage. "The uniform IGEL Linux operating system makes our desktop infrastructure independent of the hardware," explains Bernhard Panzer. "It is no longer important which actual PC system is involved. The PC hardware, which is excessively weighed down by air pollution and lubricant particles, will continue operating until it breaks down. It will then be replaced by a physical thin client." Panzer regards the uniform device and license management with the IGEL Universal Management Suite, which comes standard with each device, as yet another reason for migrating the PCs. In addition to the UDC licenses, A.T.U is currently rolling out 1,300 physical IGEL UD3 LX thin clients for all POS units. "Each store generally has a main cash desk and a secondary cash desk with receipt printer, cash drawer and payment terminal," says Panzer. "The IGEL thin clients offer sufficient peripheral interfaces for this purpose. The data is transmitted from each POS to the data center by means of serial port mapping and a guaranteed bandwidth of 400 KBit/s per POS on the provider side. The remaining bandwidth of the 2 Mbit/s leased line is shared by the consultant desks. We guarantee unrestricted store operation with this concept."

Efficient IT operation in head office

Once the last store has been connected to the central data center and all local servers have been replaced, A.T.U will have to pay more than 300,000 Euro less per year in comparison with the PC infrastructure

Experienced partner, fast rollout

A.T.U. was supported in the modernization project by IBM Global Technology Services, which planned and accompanied the server-based computing concept. The partner also helped out with the design of the POS solution. "Positive experiences with IGEL and IBM as prime contractor boded well from the outset for the joint project," reported Consultant Dr. Claus Weigand."

Further optimization steps planned

Following conclusion of the roll-out of the central store IT, the POS terminals and the thin clients with the IGEL operating system, there will be no further Windows® PCs in operation with the exception of a few notebooks. Longterm A.T.U also wants to further develop the savings potential of the IGEL thin clients, for example by implementing IP telephony via Softphone and the integrated SIP client, or by using the integrated multimedia functionalities for video presentations at the point of sale. "IGEL has accompanied our migration project with excellent expertise and great commitment and shown just what its thin client solutions are made of, both in terms of hardware and software," explains Manfred Gerlach. "This is something we will build on in the future."