Stryker is an $8.3 billion medical technology company with 350 employees in Australia and 21,000 globally. It sells reconstructive, medical, surgical and neurotechnology devices to hospitals around the world.

In 2006, the company "had an infrastructure that was almost reaching its end of life, and we were looking for alternatives and opportunities to do an upgrade of the existing ERP application," Levin told Computerworld Australia. Stryker hoped to improve stability, performance and reduce its existing footprint of physical architecture, he said.

"Within the Australian and New Zealand network we have distribution centres" with staff "who perform warehouse tasks as well as financial and normal office administrative tasks," Levin said. Stryker wanted to find a way to connect them to the ERP application "so that their experience in using the system was as if the application was sitting in the same office as where they were at," he said.

Besides Citrix XenApp, Stryker considered Microsoft Terminal Server, Levin said. Alternatively, it considered manually distributing the client to each work station, he said. Stryker chose Citrix in part because it had a small footprint of Citrix already and was familiar with platform, but also because the product made updates faster and easier than the other options, he said.

With the JDE ERP platform, "you need to redistribute the client once you've made the changes," Levin said. "And so if you had all the clients physically installed on each of the workstations around Australia and New Zealand, it would mean that we'd have to update each of those workstations individually."