myToys.de

Story Details

Since its launch in 1999, the Internet mail-order business myToys.de, which sells toys and games for children and families, has grown by 30% to 40% every year. The Berlin-based company sells its merchandise at stationary branch offices, a mail-order catalog, and its website. As a result, customers communicate with the company using several channels, including fax, telephone, and e-mail.

Christmas and Easter are particularly busy times for myToys.de. The customer service team grows by 60% in November, December, January and at Easter. This seasonal growth presents a logistical challenge for managers, employees, and the IT department alike.

Until recently, myToys.de met this challenge with the help of a classic PC infrastructure. But this meant that a large number of individual devices had to be administered, serviced, and updated constantly. This was not only a problem with the arrival of the many seasonal employees; but it also had an impact on service as one shift replaced the next. It would take up to 10 minutes for a service agent to log off and another to log on to a PC - downtime that had an effect on the bottom line.

Things came to a head in the middle of 2008. As Olaf Brehmer, head of System Administration, myToys.de, says, "The business continued to grow at a healthy rate, and this put additional strain on the customer service team. In addition, the PCs had come to the end of their technical contracts. It was time to find a replacement solution to address all the issues facing the business."

When selecting a new solution, other technology suppliers were considered apart from Sun, but the proposals were too expensive. Instead, myToys.de focused on the Sun VDI Software, taking into account the successful deployment of other Sun solutions within the company. For example, myToys.de uses Sun VDI Software to connect external workstations and branch offices. The company's logistics department, for its part, works with Sun Ray 2 thin clients. When the head of engineering for Sun VDI demonstrated these two technologies working together, it soon became clear that this was the ideal combination of reliability, simple administration, and inexpensive administration that myToys.de was looking for. In addition, the demonstration showed that Sun technology could scale to meet seasonal changes in demand and reduce handover time between shifts.

Deployment was fast, challenging, and ultimately successful. Implementation started at the end of August 2008, which didn't leave any time for a proof of concept before the busy run up to the Christmas season began. In the end, the experts from Sun Microsystems had only 10 business days to set up the new solution based on the Sun StorageTek 6540 array, seven Sun Fire X4100 servers, a Sun Fire T2000 server, 65 Sun Ray 2 thin clients and the Solaris 10 Operating System. An additional 20 employees access the Sun VDI via Sun Secure Global Desktop Software.

Employees at myToys.de are pleased that they can now connect laptops and desktop PCs to the company network. This means they can choose to work at their own desk, at another office, or at home, and still have access to all their applications and documents. Communication with customers is also much simpler because an employee can move his or her current session from one workstation to another seamlessly by inserting a smart card into another device. For example, if an agent needs to check a customer inquiry with a team leader, the agent can restart the session at the team leader's desk. This use of smart cards also means that, instead of 10 minutes, it takes just 2 minutes for shift workers to take over the workstations from their predecessors.

The deployment has been so successful that it's attracting attention from other teams in the company. Brehmer says, "The finance department was so excited that we recently converted about 75% of the their workstations and we're getting inquiries from other parts of the business as well."