We live in an age of intelligence. From phones and cars to homes and networks, everything is smart – even farming, thanks to Ravensdown. The New Zealand farmer-owned cooperative is enabling a smarter way to farm by providing its owners – who produce food that feeds 20 million people around the world – with innovative products, expertise and technology that minimize environmental impacts and allow them to optimise value from their land. And with the help of Citrix Systems, Inc. and Citrix Systems Solution Advisor and 2019 Partner Innovation Award finalist Inde Technology, the co-op is taking things to new levels.

“Technology is an important part of enabling smarter farming, and improving customer experience,” said Mark McAtamney, CIO of Ravensdown. To this end, Ravensdown has overhauled the IT network that powers its quarries and stores.

“Many companies are facing complex upgrade and patching challenges within their application and desktop delivery platforms, all combined with more and more initiatives to adopt cloud services,” said Ralf Donkers, Consulting Engineer, Inde.  “Working closely with Ravensdown, we helped them transition to an evergreen Citrix® Workspace control plane combined with a next-generation network based on Citrix SD-WAN technology, resulting in optimal delivery of all their applications complemented by a robust network infrastructure for accessing the cloud.”

And according to McAtamney, an improved customer experience. “Our stores and quarries across the country have been benefitting from a physical overhaul,” he said. “It’s easy to notice the difference when a new roof goes on, but behind-the-scenes projects like the Citrix upgrade help our staff deliver the services our customers value.”

Secure, Reliable Technology

Ravensdown’s IT network supports 750 users across 50 sites. And with many of these sites in rural locations where performance issues and network outages are common, keeping this network reliably connected was a major challenge. According to David Forster, Infrastructure Manager for Ravensdown, patching and upgrades had become a big overhead for the co-op’s IT team.

“We wanted to work smarter and free the team up to focus on new and innovative technology solutions,” he said. “So we began looking for a solution that ticked all the boxes. It had to improve end-user experience, network resilience and the delivery of our computer applications.”

And it found one in Citrix.

“The Citrix suite stood out as the best option,” Forster said. “It delivered an ecosystem that gave us the integrated platform we were after and users say it’s making a difference in terms of syncing data and simplifying things.

A Modern, Unified Experience

With the help of Inde, Ravensdown implemented Citrix’s digital workspace and networking solutions.

 “For Ravensdown, it’s important the staff working throughout the country have a reliable and consistent experience,” Donkers said. “Like the environmental consultant out in the field aggregating data on the farms who needs to move that data to central services.”

Using Citrix Workspace and Citrix SD-WAN, Inde has helped Ravensdown deliver this experience. “With the implementation of Citrix SD-WAN across our stores, network outages have gone away and performance has improved for our core applications,” Forster said.

The high moment in Inde’s mind? “When we had Ravensdown’s SD-WAN in a box in the middle of nowhere and three days of zero downtime,” said Rik Roberts, Consulting Engineer, Inde.

Simple. Intelligent. Reliable. Secure. This is the future of work. And with Citrix and Inde, Ravensdown is delivering it today. To learn more about the co-op’s efforts, click here.