Citrix paves the way for Lafarge
J.D. Edwards solutions are designed to meet enterprise software needs, as well as moving beyond the walls of an enterprise to collaborate with partners, vendors, and customers. They are now moving into what they call the next phase of e-business in the Internet economy: collaborative commerce (c-commerce). To them, c-commerce is the ability to deliver open, collaborative technologies that allow communication among organizations, suppliers and customers across the supply chain.
Currently Lafarge uses Citrix MetaFrame application server to provide its 30 staff in three different offices across the Philippines access to the Financials suite of the JDE OneWorld ERP software. In order to provide a further 40 users access to JDE OneWorld’s Inventory Management and Purchase Order Management modules, another MetaFrame server will be installed.
It was in an attempt to gain better control of its bottom line and accelerate its time-to-delivery capabilities that made Lafarge go with both Citrix and J.D. Edwards.
“To focus on maximising our core business competencies in today’s competitive environment, it is not only essential to ensure the instant availability of business-critical applications, but also to retain centralised IT management,” said Lauro Matias, CIO, Lafarge Cement Philippines Inc. “The server-based solution from Citrix enables Lafarge to deploy and manage its enterprise applications clients consistently across any number of users in just one go, without the expense of investing in substantial IT support resources. It took us only four weeks to install Citrix client software sequentially across four locations. After that, whatever applications we wanted to deploy was done at the Citrix server side.”
“Based on our research and studies, Citrix ICA is the most network-efficient client, requiring the least network bandwidth per user and is the least sensitive to network latency,” added Matias. “This is great especially with today’s difficulties in setting up telecommunications to highly remote cement plants.” MetaFrame’s ability to provide different security levels of encryption for data transmission was another key factor in choosing the solution, Matias explained.
Citrix is naturally pleased at Lafarge’s decision. Commented Nabeel Youakim, managing director, Citrix Systems Asia Pacific. “Lafarge is one of those companies who have realised such benefits from adopting a server-based computing model. We look forward to further expanding our strong relationship with Lafarge by continuously offering powerful application server solutions to meet its growing IT needs."