Garanti BBVA boosts remote productivity with Omnissa Horizon

Garanti BBVA is an integrated financial services group comprising its international subsidiary in the Netherlands, alongside financial subsidiaries in the fields of personal pensions and life insurance, financial leasing, factoring, investment, and portfolio management.

Garanti BBVA migrated from its legacy virtual desktop vendor to Omnissa Horizon® to support remote work and modernize its digital infrastructure. The deployment provides visibility, control, and operational efficiency across thousands of virtual desktops. The two-month migration required no new hardware and supported agility, operational continuity, employee productivity, user experience, and customer satisfaction.

Driving success through smart technology and people

Garanti BBVA is clear that its success is driven by smart use of data and technology, as well as its people, as evidenced by its award-winning internet, mobile, and social banking platforms. Beyond these customer-focused initiatives, the bank has undertaken a ten-year transformation to strengthen its digital capabilities internally, and continues to invest in a robust and reliable, high-performing technological infrastructure that empowers its users.

Balancing flexibility with performance and control

The digitization of banking services coincided with a greater number of employees seeking remote or hybrid work options. “Of course, that was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Ali Albayrak, Digital Workplace Application Technologies Manager at Garanti BBVA Technology. “But enabling our colleagues to work efficiently from remote locations is an important part of our mission to reach our customers from anywhere in the country—and to serve them with fast and effective solutions.”

However, the bank was finding it difficult to monitor its legacy remote systems and solutions effectively, and to understand how they were performing in the field. “As a bank, we operate on a customer-focused solution structure, and we attach great importance to it,” says Albayrak. “We wanted to make sure that all the services and solutions we offer work effectively—wherever we offer them.”

Deploying Horizon VDI for fast, secure, remote access

Having already achieved extensive virtualization across its IT estate, Garanti BBVA chose to move away from its legacy desktop virtualization vendor and implement Omnissa Horizon. By deploying Horizon VDI in combination with Omnissa App Volumes and Omnissa Dynamic Environment Manager, the bank created a complete virtual workspace solution.

Garanti BBVA also worked closely with Omnissa Professional Services before and during the transition to Horizon. “Omnissa Horizon would sit at the center of our virtualization infrastructure, so we wanted to make sure we set up the correct topology and implemented it in line with best practices,” says Albayrak. “We benefited enormously from our collaboration with Omnissa Professional Services. They helped ensure that our infrastructure was properly set up and configured.”

Ultimately, Albayrak’s team was able to complete its migration to Horizon in under two months, moving about 4,000 virtual desktops without disruption to users and without purchasing new hardware. “The transition was fast and largely pain-free,” says Albayrak. “Users started to tell us immediately that it had improved their experience.”

Achieving speed, visibility, and smarter remote operations

Once implemented, Horizon enabled Garanti BBVA to centrally manage its users’ devices, based on their roles within the bank. Using Dynamic Environment Manager, Albayrak and his team were able to centralize users’ app settings and profiles, so that they could easily connect to virtual machines and individual settings as easily as to a physical computer. When problems occur in the field, the central team can quickly restore the correct work environment.

Albayrak and his team can now collect technical data from clients and monitor them proactively, which allows them to observe any changes to the systems and detect problems centrally. They can also monitor solutions and provide proactive support. For example, if a user’s Wi-Fi signal drops, the central team can advise users on how to improve the connection.

“We virtualized our employees’ computers and, thanks to Omnissa Horizon, made the whole process quicker and more compatible with remote work, without degrading the user experience,” says Albayrak. “We accelerated our onboarding processes and made daily operations faster, and reduced delays and holdups—all of which increased our customers’ satisfaction to the highest level.”

Boosting efficiency and user experience across the bank

Garanti BBVA also deployed Horizon for its call centers, using Instant Clones to quickly create new machines and put them into production. “Instant Clone technology in Horizon was very important to us because we could update systems quickly and ensure their security,” says Albayrak. “We sped up operationally, and because we used our resources efficiently, we were able to produce more VDI resources.”

In addition, apps used by the bank’s Treasury, portfolio management, and investment desks are now delivered through the Horizon VDI environment. “This goes beyond enabling our remote users to work much faster and more efficiently,” says Albayrak. “Horizon makes a valuable contribution to our critical business continuity framework. The benefits of adopting Horizon and working with Professional Services have exceeded our expectations.”