Kansai Electric Power Co. (KEPCO) is promoting innovation and digitalisation of its various social infrastructures and services, focusing on its core businesses of energy, power transmission and distribution, information and telecommunications, and lifestyle and business solutions.
As part of their major steps toward digital transformation, they have established one of the world’s largest virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments which can be used by up to 34,000 group employees from KEPCO and Kansai Transmission and Distribution, and they have begun offering Microsoft 365 and Box.
The decision to use the Nutanix Cloud Platform was based on its simplicity, ease of operation, ability to expand and update without disruptions, and outstanding cost savings, in addition to its high performance, reliability and availability.
It was also chosen for its ability to operate stably and safely in a large-scale environment including more than 600 physical nodes, which is necessary to accommodate up to 34,000 users, with significant improvements in operability using automatic update functions.
Work anywhere is the new normal
Using Nutanix has brought about a change in work styles and, as online meetings have progressed, effective information-sharing and decision-making have become possible regardless of location or time. Employees who shifted to remote work due to the COVID pandemic have also improved their productivity significantly when choosing a flexible work style. In addition, the company has reduced substantial operational efforts and man-hours needed to replicate virtual machines, from 20 minutes down to a few seconds.
“We now have an environment where we can communicate and collaborate smoothly, no matter where our employees are, be it in the office, on the road, or at home,” said Akinori Kawai, information and communications engineering group, Office of IT Strategy at KEPCO. “We feel we have been able to steadily improve both our productivity as well as user convenience.”
He opined that the most significant achievement is the VDI environment has enabled them to work in a flexible way.
“In the next stage, we would like to consider using the cloud as a disaster recovery countermeasure,” he continued.
