SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

In the home renovation industry, keeping up with current redesign trends while also offering a realistic price point is essential. The Tile Shop, a leading retailer of ceramic tiles with 120 stores across the U.S., adopted secure networking technology from Citrix to bring an expanded digital shopping experience to each physical store. Its IT team implemented Citrix NetScaler SD-WAN with Citrix XenDesktop to enable accelerated access to internal business applications from every store, increase bandwidth to create consistent access to apps needed daily at a lower cost and significantly reduce latency. The key objective for the Sales Associates of The Tile Shop today is to help customers understand the variety of products that are offered, assist in designing a customer’s dream space, and utilize technologies such as the new Design Studio software, which allows customers to create a virtual project space to see what their tile renovation would look like. With the addition of the Citrix solutions, The Tile Shop is able to achieve all of these goals.

Helping customers become more engaged and enabling employees to work better to improve productivity is the reason Citrix secure desktop and networking solutions were chosen. Emergent Networks, a Minneapolis-based IT advisory firm and Citrix Platinum channel partner, advised The Tile Shop IT team to adopt a solution that would improve network speed for all the branches, and offer ease-of-use and connection redundancy. More than 90 stores have since been shifted to the digital networking architecture and virtualization solution to date with deployment averaging approximately 30 minutes per store. The Tile Shop expects a solid return on investment within 16-20 months of implementation. Though wholesale bandwidth prices continue to vary by geography and by carrier, an SD-WAN architecture is actually much less expensive versus traditional WAN approaches that rely on dedicated MPLS circuits.

The new architecture has also improved network uptime by moving branch traffic to the corporate data center which aggregates multiple different internet connections and helps route traffic much faster, while also safeguarding each location from being cut-off from the network entirely. Given the significant benefits The Tile Shop has seen, it’s not a surprise that Gartner estimates that by 2020, more than 50% of WAN edge infrastructure refresh initiatives will be based on SD-WAN versus traditional routers¹. Integrated Citrix solutions have enabled The Tile Shop to provide enhanced digital experiences for the sales associates and customers by facilitating quicker communication via email, more efficient use of other store applications, and being able to deliver an extraordinary in store Design Studio experience to all customers.

Quotes

Keith Hogie, CIO, The Tile Shop

“The experience on Design Studio is much cleaner and interactive for both our Sales Associates and customers because of the Citrix NetScaler SD-WAN networking infrastructure and Citrix XenDesktop virtualization technology. It allows us to keep up with our customers’ digital expectations.”

Jamie Anderson, President, Emergent Networks

“The issues The Tile Shop was experiencing suggested that they needed a new networking strategy versus simply adding a bigger WAN pipe. Based on our experience as a long time Citrix XenDesktop customer, we felt that a software-defined wide area network approach based on Citrix NetScaler SD-WAN would improve network speed for branch locations and offer ease-of-use and connection redundancy. In the end, the solution delivered exactly what we expected and proved to be the best choice.”

Related Links

• NetScaler SD-WAN Product Page
• XenDesktop Product Page
• Announcement:

• Video: Danish Ministry of Agrifish
• Video: Emergent Networks & The Tile Shop
• Case Study: The Tile Shop & Citrix

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• Facebook: Citrix

About Citrix

Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) aims to power a world where people, organizations and things are securely connected and accessible to make the extraordinary possible. Its technology makes the world’s apps and data secure and easy to access, empowering people to work anywhere and at any time. Citrix provides a complete and integrated portfolio of Workspace-as-a-Service, application delivery, virtualization, mobility, network delivery and file sharing solutions that enables IT to ensure critical systems are securely available to users via the cloud or on-premise and across any device or platform. With annual revenue in 2015 of $3.28 billion, Citrix solutions are in use by more than 400,000 organizations and over 100 million users globally. Learn more at www.citrix.com.

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¹ Gartner Webinar, High-Tech Tuesday Webinar: SD-WAN Forecast and Opportunity — How SD-WAN Will Disrupt the Router Market, Joe Skorupa, 12/5/16

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