Headquartered in Kansas City, Mo., Birch Telecom is one of the largest competitive local exchange carriers in the Midwest. The company offers a wide range of telecommunications services to small and mid-size businesses. As Birch grew, its ability to serve customers efficiently was significantly impacted by the slow performance and unreliability of its provisioning application as it ran over the company's WAN. Adding to the inefficiency, 140 salespeople in 60 field offices were submitting work orders via overnight mail services.

To address these issues, Birch worked with InfoLAN, a Platinum-level Citrix® Solution Advisor, to implement Citrix MetaFrame® Presentation Server for Windows® to deliver the provisioning system and a new custom work order form application (SOFIE) to 850 users in the company's call centers and sales offices. As a result, Birch improved application performance by 200 percent, saved $100,000 annually in overnight delivery charges and sharply reduced demands on helpdesk and IT staff.

"Running the provisioning application on Windows 2000 Servers with Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server solved the dramatic performance problems caused by deploying the fat database application over the WAN,"said Jan Banks, manager of Intel Systems for Birch. "Application performance has vastly improved. Now, our customer service staff can spend their time assisting customers instead of waiting for computer screens to paint or calling the helpdesk. Implementing SOFIE on the MetaFrame Presentation Server platform has allowed work orders from the field to be electronically processed into Birch's provisioning and billing systems while eliminating overnight delivery charges and speeding up new order processing."

In addition, centralized application deployment has eliminated the need to "touch" each desktop for monthly application upgrades. Banks concluded, "Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server software has enabled us to improve our efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness in serving customers in this ever-changing market."

About Birch Telecom

Birch Telecom provides integrated telecommunications services to small and midsize businesses throughout Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas. The company offers a full array of services and products including local and long-distance phone services, Internet access, Web hosting and business phone equipment. For more information, visit www.birch.com.