Fortune 500 company (and VMware partner) NetApp brings in more than $6 billion in revenue by providing big businesses with technology to store and manage data. NetApp’s customers are major innovators, using data management to its fullest potential to grow their businesses. And NetApp’s engineers play a major role in keeping the company’s technology up to speed with customers’ demands.

To accomplish that, engineers needed help from IT to increase their work productivity. They needed a new level of flexibility in order to access work in between meetings and while traveling. They needed to be able to securely work on any device, while keeping the experience consistent and the performance high.

In fact, NetApp’s engineers are so integral to maintaining a competitive advantage that the company’s executives called for a complete desktop transformation. IT was tasked to virtualize desktops for more than 8,000 employees across four of the company’s research and development (R&D) locations.

IT only had two weeks to complete the project.

Make That 10,000 Virtual Desktops

In 12 days, NetApp equipped 10,000 employees with a Virtual Engineering Desktop (VED), exceeding their initial goal using scalable VMware Horizon technology. (That was easy.)

[Related: VMware Horizon 7: Your High Performance, Ultra-Secure, Throwaway Laptop Is Waiting For You]

Combining VMware, NetApp and Cisco technologies, the company’s VED solution provides a private cloud-based development and QA environment to engineers with company source code, resources and productivity applications specific to the engineer’s role at NetApp. Engineers receive a consistent desktop experience without being limited by their hardware, so they can truly work on any device. The VED not only makes engineers’ work accessible at any time and any place but also secures the company’s highly sensitive intellectual property that resides on those virtual desktops.

“We’ve been able to increase productivity by enabling engineers to start and stop work whenever they need to. Engineers don’t have to be chained to their desks in order to get work done securely. Whether building code on a work laptop or reading internal wikis on a phone, employees can access a secure environment from all devices without a diminished experience.”

— Chris Gebhardt Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, NetApp

Learn more about NetApp’s desktop transformation with Horizon and find out how the company is planning for the future. Read the NetApp case study here.