Tennis Point is Europe’s largest online tennis retail store and also operates 13 physical stores in the DACH region. The revenue is more than 70 Million Euros and growing.
The business started out almost 20 years ago as a start-up. Since then, the growth has been rapid. More than 5000 packages are sent now out every day – sold through the tennis-point.de online store, new businesses were acquired and more brick and mortar stores were opened.
“These acquisitions and new openings have put us in a predicament we were not familiar with: how do we support the end-user infrastructure in both stores and warehouses?” said Fabian Lauer, Head of Technology. “We didn’t want hire regional IT admins for our stores or warehouses, so we needed a virtual desktop infrastructure that would allow us to support any device – ThinClients in the store offices, or rugged devices on dusty warehouse floors – remotely from our IT Offices in Herzebrock-Clarholz” said Lauer.
“In short,” Lauer said, “we wanted to position IT just as dynamically as our business model”.
Jens Hennig, VMware Certified Design Expert for Desktop and Mobility (VCDX-DTM) is one of comdivision’s experts on end-user computing. Hennig implemented VMware Horizon, to provide end users with easy access to virtual desktops and published applications. “We wanted to simplify the end user’s authentication across all desktop and apps with True SSO and contextual, role-based policies” said Hennig,
“we also needed to simplify the administration of the Desktop environment – we therefore aimed to only prepare one Desktop for all users”.
To optimize performance, Henning planned to integrate VMware App Volumes: App Volumes untangles the operating system, applications, and user personalization. By doing so, all the component pieces together can be reconstituted on-demand to deliver just-in-time desktops and apps across any infrastructure topologies. “In other words,” Hennig explains, “with App Volumes, the application image can be treated independent from the OS images. If a group of users ¬– or even a single user – needs a change in any application, AppVolumes allows us to install this version of the application and present that application to just that group of users without having to touch the underlying operating system.”
Fabian Lauer was very pleased with the outcome: “we now only have to patch or update one operating system and can support our people no matter if they are sitting in Vienna, Munich or Cologne! With VMware Horizon and App Volumes we have a consistent, yet dynamic IT infrastructure for the end-user.”
