Introduction:

Leading UK home improvement company Anglian uses appCURE to successfully achieve Cyber Essentials and transform their business-critical applications to Windows 10 and Server 2019 without the need for complex reprogramming or processes.

Utilising appCURE’s unique run-time capture capability, in a matter of days, Anglian’s IT department was able to successfully move their applications to a new Citrix infrastructure supporting the latest versions and Citrix Cloud.  By successfully moving to the new Citrix platform, Anglian were able to address a number of security concerns, gain important compliance certification and protect and improve the user experience.

For over 50 years Anglian Home Improvements have been at the forefront of the nation’s home improvement industry, forging a reputation for quality and customer care.  Alongside their domestic home improvement business, Anglian has built a number of partnerships in the business arena working on large commercial and social housing projects.

As an industry-leading organisation, Anglian’s IT systems are intrinsic to the company’s competitive advantage, operations and high levels of customer service.  They are tailored specifically to meet the needs of the users and business functions.  Applications that create Bill of Materials (BOM), input specific customer requirements and manage the complete end to end process of customer order to delivery of products and services are customised from existing packages and utilise many 3rd party tools and databases.

Complex migration

Although plans are in place to replace the applications, because of the complexity and time needed to make the change, the immediate need to address the security concerns required an alternative faster approach. That approach required Anglian’s IT to move the existing applications to a more secure in-support OS, based on Windows 10 and 2019.  This meant Anglian were faced with the challenge of moving these business-critical applications to the new updated infrastructure.  However, this had its own set of challenges because of the lack of knowledge and information about the current infrastructure and applications configuration and setup.

Cyber Essentials

Anglian requires Cyber Essentials for much of their Government work and is often a key element of a bid.

“Cyber Essentials meant we had to migrate off legacy servers and desktops to achieve the certification” said Andy Browne, IS Manager, Anglian Home Improvements.

User experience and customer service

The success or failure of a desktop transformation project is tightly linked to the user experience.  A poor user experience usually has knock-on effects such as decreasing levels of productivity, customer service and the company’s performance.  Many of Anglian’s staff have been using the current applications for many years and have built up a high degree of working knowledge, skills and productivity.  At this critical period with significant changes already having an impact, IT did not want to further impact the user experience or customer service at the same time as the upgrade.  Browne said “It was important that any change enables staff to continue to work productively and efficiently maintaining the high levels of customer service Anglian has worked years to attain. “

 Loss of in-house stills and out of support servers

It is not unusual that in-house developed applications which have been customised over an extended period of time for the organisation’s specific requirements lack detailed documentation and configuration notes.  In Anglian’s case, many of the developers who worked on the original applications had left the organisation, resulting in a lack of in-house knowledge of the applications, their dependencies and configurations.  In addition, back-end servers had not been touched for years and the databases deployed were also End of Life (EOL).  So it was not surprising there was a reluctance to make changes when updates to the underlying infrastructure were required.

Advantage of appCURE

appCURE Studio is unique because of its ‘run-time capture’ enabling a running application to be captured, packaged and provisioned using Microsoft (MS) standard formats, without the need for install media, documentation or specific application knowledge.  With appCURE Studio an organisation can quickly move applications to new supported platforms on cloud, virtual or physical.  Once moved, appCURE Studio removes all the time consuming manual tasks and overhead of updates and application management by automating the many steps and processes. Moving the applications to the new platform had been considered impossible, until Browne in a conversation with their Citrix SE, identified appCURE Studio as a solution which could unlock the impasse. Browne went on to say “When we first saw appCURE we thought it was so unbelievable It must be magic! However, once the appCURE team captured the first app and showed us it working on Windows 10 we knew it was more than magic. ”

 The future

Now that the core applications, Caliburn and Heat are working successfully in Windows 10 and Server 2019, the process of capture and package with appCURE Studio is so straight forward, Anglian are now reviewing their entire application estate to see where appCURE can be applied. Already they have identified that future challenges will be Email integration and Office 365 support.

“As a business we need to streamline our application packaging process and appCURE Studio will be the foundation of this process” said Browne

Customer support and services

The appCURE team have years of experience assessing, packaging and remediating applications across both server and desktops. So when Anglian need support and services around their applications they know they can get the support required from appCURE. Browne said, “We know we have a trusted advisor with the appCURE team!”