Cruise line Royal Caribbean used almost all of Citrix’s product portfolio to consolidate its IT infrastructure while also providing a more efficient mobile workspace platform for its call center agents.

The vendor made the customer announcement today, describing how it consolidated Royal Caribbean's infrastructure down to two data centers.

Prior to Citrix, Royal Caribbean used multiple data centers at call centers in the United States and abroad to manage its guest reservations. The company also didn’t have localized IP service locations, which was another concern. The previous platform was both costly and inefficient, according to Chalan Aras, vice president and general manager of the CloudBridge Product Group at Citrix.

“They [Royal Caribbean] serve the globe so their business problem was an interesting one,” Aras says. “They are obviously a high-end, customer-facing, global company with multi-language services. Their main data center is in Miami, and from there, they take applications and deliver them across many locations to serve their customers.”

The cruise line began by using Citrix’s XenApp and XenDesktop products in Miami, but Royal Caribbean wanted to more efficiently reach its workstations and call agents in remote locations. The company’s IT department added a touch of SDN in the form of Citrix’s NetScaler App Delivery Controller to provide global load balancing for Royal Caribbean’s remote locations, while also providing networking optimization and troubleshooting capabilities.

Citrix CloudBridge, which delivers wide-area-network (WAN) optimization and cloud connectivity across the enterprise, was blended in to accelerate the use of XenDesktop while also reducing bandwidth consumption and giving call center agents consistent, fast access to the information they needed.

Aras says that while Citrix’s customer roster includes companies larger than Royal Caribbean, the cruise line deployment was initially unique due to its global footprint.

The bigger lesson learned was around the troubleshooting abilities of Citrix Insight Services. The sensor is a free tool that analyzes customers’ log files while profiling their virtualization environments. It also scans for known issues across Citrix’s product portfolio.

“When we started, that was a feature that we considered useful, but it turned out to be even more useful given their large geographic footprint,” Aras says. “Being able to see the actual application traffic and look at it from a data center, WAN, and far campus perspectives was a very powerful add-on for the troubleshooting services.”

In April, Citrix announced its SD-WAN offering, which is called CloudBridge Virtual WAN. Aras says that Citrix has signed up customers for CloudBridge Virtual WAN, but so far they are unannounced.

“Our customer base is particularly relevant to SD-WAN,” Aras says. “Many of our customers are based on branch networks or small campuses. As they centralize more applications, and as they move servers from the branch or small campuses, they become quite dependent on a high performance delivery network. That’s where our SD-WAN strategy comes into play.”

At the start of the year, Citrix announced layoffs of 900 employees. In July, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton announced his pending retirement.