IBM has announced Call & Call, one of Italy's largest Call Centers serving corporate clients throughout the country, has expanded its cloud computing initiative which has already reduced the company's desktop PC operating costs by 50 percent in the past six months.

As part of the expansion, Call & Call will migrate nearly 1,000 additional workstations from among five sites across Italy to a centralized location using IBM Smart Business Desktop Cloud and technology from Wyse, the global leader in cloud client computing.

The call center industry is an increasingly competitive market. To keep up with customer demands and provide the highest quality customer service, Call & Call was faced with regularly upgrading PCs in each call center and frequently reconfiguring systems to support customer applications. With an increasing number of resources required to manage and maintain thousands of desktop PCs, Call & Call began using virtualized desktops to eliminate the need for desk side maintenance, deliver energy cost savings and provide Call & Call employees access to better computing power for use with the most intensive multi-media applications and comprehensive customer data.

IBM's Smart Business Desktop Cloud and Wyse thin clients will improve security and increase operational efficiency through the ability to centrally manage workstations. In addition, the new solution will reduce the need for device management, simplify software license management and lower energy consumption.

"IBM's experience in services and our expertise in creating a cloud computing infrastructure has allowed us to help clients simplify their entire enterprise and become more flexible to adapt to changing market needs. Together IBM and Call & Call have created a solution to make desktops more flexible and efficient while cutting energy and IT costs with the use of IBM's Smart Business Desktop Cloud," said Rich Esposito, vice president, IBM Workplace Services, IT Strategy Services.

"The savings in virtualizing our desktops allowed us to improve the capacity of each system and provided a 90 percent reduction in energy savings, but the most important benefit has been our savings in personnel costs for deploying, upgrading and managing software and systems," said Fabio Mattaboni chief information officer, Call & Call. "The reduction in energy costs and additional savings due to the longer life of each end device and reduced support costs will make us even more competitive in our customer-focused industry."

The use of the desktop cloud environment provides automatic updates to all end devices when an application needs to be upgraded or new software is configured. This means the desktop cloud environment only requires an update on the virtual desktop environment via the server while data is managed over the secure data center servers and no longer stored on the client side.

In the future, Call & Call plans to further expand its desktop cloud environment. Call & Call has more than 1600 workstations spread among eight branches throughout Italy.

"The combination of IBM and Wyse cloud client computing solutions has strengthened the continued success of delivering a new level of flexibility to support our joint customers business demands and adapt for change," said Mark Jordan, VP, EMEA at Wyse.