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Banner Bank improves performance and saves more than $225K with AppSense
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
- Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Process Control & Optimization
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Banner Bank faced significant performance issues with its Citrix desktop environment, which supported 150 applications and 1000 employees. The resource-intensive applications caused performance degradation during activity spikes, affecting both employee productivity and customer service. The bank needed to increase capacity without investing in additional hardware and software licenses. On optimal days, they could only get six to nine people on a Citrix machine, and any spike in activity would cause system failures. The bank required more than 250 Citrix machines to keep up with the workload, leading to constant complaints about applications locking up or not responding.
About The Customer
Banner Bank is a Washington-chartered commercial bank that operates from 90 locations across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. As a community bank, it offers a wide range of commercial banking services and financial products to individuals, small, and medium-sized businesses. The bank maintains a Citrix desktop environment that supports 150 applications and 1000 employees. These applications include not only teller and loan officer applications but also business systems for all departments and standard software platforms like Microsoft Office, Acrobat Reader, and Internet Explorer. The bank faced performance issues due to resource-intensive applications, especially during month-end processing, which involved a lot of report generation and printing large files.
The Solution
Banner Bank worked with Structured Communications, an AppSense Platinum Partner, to evaluate potential solutions and ultimately chose AppSense Performance Manager. The solution was easy to manage and did not require expertise in writing code. An engineer from Structured Communications installed and tested the solution, and then the bank's IT team began throttling application CPU and RAM requirements and establishing resource thresholds. The Performance Manager allowed the bank to increase the average number of users per Citrix machine to 14, a gain of 50%. After a subsequent Citrix upgrade, the bank was able to reduce its server count from 160 to 90, significantly boosting scalability, performance, and user density per machine.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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