IGEL helps Nippon Express deliver in its global logistics business

Global logistics company Nippon Express is deploying IGEL thin clients across its 23 European business locations to cut IT administration costs and reduce complexity.

"The main driver for moving to a thin client environment was the distributed nature of our business," explained Paul Morgan, Assistant IS Manager for Operations and Infrastructure at Nippon Express. "With 23 individual locations to support across the UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France, our daily challenge was maintaining branch servers and a very distributed wide area network environment. If a server in Madrid went down, it could take some time to get it back up and working and that delay can be very costly in our industry."

The Nippon Express IT team chose the IGEL Universal Desktop 2 thin client device with the Standard Digital package. The IGEL devices are supplied by certified IGEL resellers EACS and Insight. Nippon Express has an 18 server farm running Citrix XenDesktop v5, which supports a total workstation base of up to 700 with users in warehouses through to the finance department. Over the next 3 years, the IT team expects an almost 100% conversion to IGEL thin clients.

Each department within the organisation has a tailored desktop image to meet its needs and the IT team roll-out the thin clients using the IGEL Universal Management Software (UMS). Using the UMS, which comes bundled free with every IGEL Universal Desktop, Nippon Express has a simple to use management tool which can have thin clients up and running in minutes. Intuitive to use, secure and scalable to up to 100,000 thin clients, the IGEL UMS drastically reduces management time for IT administrators, eliminating the need for the majority of site visits.

"We evaluated a number of manufacturer's products and found that whilst all had strengths in certain areas, there was no one killer product that provided us with everything we required - apart from IGEL. We were very impressed with the bundled UMS software, the flexibility of application delivery and pleasantly surprised by the IGEL price. The main advantage of using IGEL thin clients in year one is the costs. The overall purchase price of an IGEL device is much, much lower than a traditional PC and the ongoing support costs in years 2, 3 and 4 are far lower. As a by-product, being a disk less and fan less device, the IGEL devices also consume far less power than traditional PCs which helps us to reduce our carbon footprint."