A new national housing agency with a mandate to transform housing provision in England is half way through an application delivery change programme that will also transform its desktop real estate.
Set up as recently as December 2008, the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) is a new homing and regeneration agency charged with finding new ways to sustain housing development activity by funding councils to bring empty homes back into use.
The body brings together the functions and business applications of English Partnerships, the Housing Corporation and some of the work of Communities and Local Government and the Academy for Sustainable Communities.
Before its launch, the agency worked with Centralis Ltd, an IT consulting house that specialises in application delivery using a Citrix infrastructure, to provide it with a flexible desktop application delivery platform.
“We see flexibility and scalability as central to our strategy” said Tina Hughes, ICT Manager at HCA. In summer 2008 the existing infrastructure was reviewed to determine what would need to be scaled up and what was fit for purpose.
Together, HCA and Centralis have deployed Citrix XenApp and Netscaler to centralise delivery of the Agency’s applications for 500 users. Another 500 seats will be deployed during the year.
Citrix XenApp is a Windows application delivery system that manages applications at the server and delivers them as an on-demand service to users.
