Have Device, Will Travel: Travel Technology Leader Mobilizes Employees Using Citrix XenMobile MDM

Serving thousands of travel agencies, travel suppliers and corporations in the Asia-Pacific region, Sabre Pacific uses “advanced technological solutions and services that are uniquely ours” so that the company can “bring travel to life for millions of people each year.” The company offers dozens of travel-related solutions from air, rail, car rental, and hotel management systems, travel documentation services, corporate booking tools, ticket automation, low fare search technologies, and a robust travel-related business app marketplace.

As a leading technology provider with a large field sales organization and fleet of client-facing technicians, it is important for the company to stay on the cutting edge of emerging technology as well as project a tech-savvy image to its customers. Tasked with an objective to roll out corporate-issued iPads to field personnel while also supporting BYOD, Sabre Pacific’s IT team began looking at mobile device management solutions. On point was Sabre Pacific’s Technical Lead, Lisa Phelan.

The challenge: Give users advanced mobility while keeping it simple for IT to manage

Like many organizations, Sabre Pacific had issued and supported corporate-issued BlackBerry devices for mobile users in the past. And, like many other IT organizations, Lisa and team found that their users’ needs were changing: “When your salespeople and support crew are the face of technology innovation, they need to use the latest technology. Many of them – including our management team – started bringing in their iPhones. They wanted to use them for work. And we wanted to make it happen.” In order to stay ahead of the curve, Lisa and team began the process of mapping out their requirements to ensure a smooth transition from a BlackBerry Enterprise Server environment to one that included an MDM solution and a mix of corporate-issued and user-owned smartphones and tablets.

The team pulled together its MDM requirements based on a combination of use cases and past experiences managing mobility. Lisa shares some of the requirements her team considered:

• Easy administration. “We don’t have a large IT staff, so we needed something that was intuitive and lightweight to administer.”
• Role-based configuration of policies and apps. “We needed to push out business apps to groups in a uniform way, as well as easily pre-configure VPN, email, regional WiFi configurations and internal applications.”
• Good end-user experience. “We want our users to experience the devices’ features and apps as they were intended. We didn’t want to sandbox them in and ruin it.”
• Roaming cost control. “We were spending thousands of dollars in phone bills monthly as a result of people using data roaming on iPhones. Someone would be traveling, and they’d download a few emails and watch a video. All of a sudden, you’d be looking at a several thousand dollar phone bill.”
• Protection from device loss/theft. “If a device was lost or stolen we needed to be able to wipe it remotely.”
• Cloud-based solution. “We already have dozens of servers to manage. We didn’t need one more! We wanted to take advantage of a well-managed cloud solution.”

The solution: XenMobile MDM addresses Sabre Pacific’s requirements while simplifying roll-out

Lisa and team evaluated four different MDM solutions. They talked to their IT counterparts at other companies and consulted reports from industry analyst firms, including Gartner Group. Phelan notes: “We spoke with the IT Director at a large bank here in Australia, and he recommended Citrix. That influenced us.”

Following the evaluation, Phelan and team chose the cloud-based option of XenMobile MDM. XenMobile MDM runs on a highly-available, globally-redundant cloud infrastructure with a 100% uptime SLA. Lisa calls out two primary factors contributing to the team’s decision:

• Intuitive administration. “The Citrix interface just made sense to me and my team. It is laid out in an intuitive manner and the wizard is helpful in packaging up policies and apps. We looked at some of the others’ and thought: ‘This will be difficult to learn and manage.’”
• Transparent to users. “Citrix manages the device while preserving user experience; it doesn’t alter the way the apps work on the device or disrupt the way users want to work.”

As part of Sabre Pacific’s MDM deployment, Lisa engaged Citrix Professional Services to train her team. “At first we were skeptical because the training was performed remotely,” Phelan explains. “But it was great. Our trainer helped us kill two birds with one stone: He liaised directly with our firewall administrator to help us solve some of our networking issues. Then he trained my team to the point that we now feel very comfortable managing Citrix and handling any user issues that arise. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and this is probably the smoothest deployment I’ve ever experienced.”

“I only refer products I’m happy with, and I’m very happy with Citrix,” summarizes Lisa. “Technical support has been awesome in sorting out our technical requirements and implementing a comprehensive mobile security solution in record time. As a leading technology organization, we had to choose the best of breed MDM solution, and it is Citrix.”

The result: MDM that supports Sabre Pacific now and in the future

Today, Lisa and team have rolled out a number of applications to mobile users, including TripCase, a Sabre app; Microsoft Link for instant messaging; and shortcuts to the company intranet and service desk; in addition to email and VPN. “A user can walk into any regional office and automatically join the WiFi, get on the VPN and connect to Sharepoint, CRM and Servicedesk applications.”

From a policy standpoint, despite needing to keep an eye on PCI compliance as the company deploys future apps that touch payment data, Lisa and team want to give users as much freedom as possible. Beyond controlling roaming costs, enforcing passcodes, and blocking explicit content, the team is restricting very little. “We want to encourage our users to play with their devices and have fun,” Lisa notes. “It enables users to fully utilize their device so they understand the technology when presenting to clients.”

Lisa and team have a lot planned for Sabre Pacific’s mobile future. They look forward to helping their users be more productive on-the-go. And Citrix looks forward to helping them do it!