Element Six Case Study

Citrix supports extreme performance for Element Six

A leader in synthetic diamond super-materials uses Citrix to deliver a high-performance workspace anywhere in the world.

Element Six – named after carbon, the sixth element in the periodic table – employs nearly 2,000 people in locations around the world. Part of the De Beers group, Element Six has a mission to “deliver extreme performance through the development of cutting-edge synthetic diamond and tungsten carbide solutions.”

The business’s IT environment reflects its demanding mission.

Some of Element Six’s sites are situated in remote locations with poor internet connectivity. Its engineering applications are particularly resource-hungry, performing complex calculations on large volume of data and, as Service Delivery Manager Frank Cosgrove explains, “We operate in a very specialised field, so a lot of our software and hardware is bespoke. Our core infrastructure is in our European datacenters but we have a global footprint so we need to deliver high-speed, high-availability access to facilities around the world.”

Element Six employees collaborate with colleagues around the world. Many are mobile and the business wanted to support more modern, flexible ways of working.

“We wanted to improve performance and user experience for all scenarios, without compromising security,” says Cosgrove.

“Enterprise Solutions took the time to understand what we needed and how we use Citrix in an industrial environment,” - Frank Cosgrove

The team worked with Platinum Citrix Solutions Advisor Enterprise Solutions Ltd to develop Project Workspace, Element Six’s plan to “provide secure any-device access to always accessible applications, services and information.”

Element Six has been a Citrix customer for many years and, working with Enterprise Solutions Ltd, Cosgrove, and the E6’s IT team upgraded to Citrix Workspace.

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Extreme performance for every scenario

“With Citrix, we now have a consistently stable environment that adapts to the business without IT staff even being involved,” he continues. “People can change teams or locations and their permissions are governed by Active Directory. We have the security that we need as an industrial leader. With Citrix Cloud, we can automatically scale the number of servers in use to ensure stable performance. We rarely have outages or even support tickets.”

With Office 365 and Citrix now in the cloud, the Element Six team is planning to move all workloads to the cloud over the next three years.

Your workspace from one button

Citrix Workspace also improves individual productivity and cross-regional collaboration. The solutions supports web-conferencing and makes it easy to share resources securely, improving collaboration and reducing travel.

“With Workspace on Azure, staff get their entire workspace from one button. They have single sign-on and seamless access to all their resources: JD Edwards, Finance apps, Office 365 and SharePoint,” explains Cosgrove.

“And, the benefit is not only at sign-on” he continues. “Staff enjoy ease of use, speed and performance wherever they are. Workspace supports individual’s workflows. There’s no need to leave Workspace to open any other apps. And, if someone is working in a different location, they don’t worry about file shares, printers etc. Citrix figures it all out for you.”

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