Abraaj Capital zeroes-in on Citrix XenApp for faster application delivery

Abraaj Capital is a premier private equity firm in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (MENASA) region, headquartered in Dubai . With multiple awards under its belt like the 'Middle East Private Equity Firm of the Year' from Private Equity International (2005, 2006 & 2007), the Banker Middle East Award for 'Best Private Equities Institution' in 2006 and for 'Outstanding Contribution to Financial Services in the Middle East' in 2007 to name a few, Abraaj Capital is certainly one of the finest investment firms in the Middle East region.

For a growing business, expansion is the next step towards taking the organization to new heights. Abraaj Capital too is now expanding and is looking at extending their operations in Pakistan, Egypt, and Lebanon. To make this expansion a success, Abraaj Capital needed a system for seamless and faster information/application exchange between the branch offices. For an organization in the highly volatile financial sector, information exchange becomes critical to ensuring successful operations.

Solutions ME had a ready solution to their requirement – Citrix XenApp™, a member of the Citrix Delivery Center product family. It is an end-to-end Windows application delivery system that offers both client-side and server-side application virtualization, for optimal application performance and flexible delivery options. XenApp allows IT to deliver secure applications as a service, providing on-demand access to users while affording IT the flexibility to leverage future application architectures. It provides several benefits that make it a strategic system for application delivery.

As per the protocols followed by Solutions ME, Saif Khan, Product Manager - Citrix Application and Networking Group at SME, understood the requirements of the client and analyzed which solution would suit them the best and suggested Citrix XenApp™ – Enterprise Version. The next important thing was to build the trust in the client to deploy it in their system. They were offered a Proof of Concept exercise which went on for a month. In this period of a month, Abraaj Capital's IT division was able to test application access for users from all locations. The users found application access using XenApp™ secure and way much faster than the VPN system that they were using before. Abraaj Capital is a Citrix customer now using 50 user's licenses of XenApp™ Enterprise version.