Virtual Story - 2

This customer is based in Chennai and having their offices across the country. They have been buying high end Desktops from different vendors including HP to meet their requirements. They wanted to explore Thinclients and tried with different solutions from different vendors – right from SBC to VDI but they were not able to finalize on the right solution. When we went with the Desktop virtualization concept the IT head of the organization explained the challenges they faced and they were more in a denial mode as they did not wanted to go in for a testing mode again. After some convincing the customer agreed to work with HP and gave us about one week time, mean time they were also finalizing on the Desktop configuration and pricing to meet their requirement – The IT Head was saying “Any how nothing is going to come out so better prepared with the Desktop pricing and config details so that the same can be ordered.. J J)

Before finalizing a solution, we looked at the solutions the customer tested earlier and the reasons why they failed or rejected by the users. This helped us to understand the customer expectation very clearly. On the analysis we found the below are the key points which need to be addressed if the solution to be accepted by the customer.

For the IT Team

- Security was a major challenge – Physical security and the Data Security

- The deployment should be done without intervention of a IT staff at the remote locations

- Down time should be very minimal or NIL

- Solution should be accepted by their internal users

For End users:

- Performance is very important – They are in to stock broking they cannot afford to have any lag in the operation

- The required key applications should be available for use

- Down time should be very less or NIL

Considering the above we could able to find out why all the earlier POC’s by different vendors failed here. Till then all the vendors they worked with, offered them a regular solutions which was not meeting their overall requirements. Then after a 2-3 days of working closely with the users we could able to suggest a solution based Application Specific Terminal Concept and the POC went on well. Now all their agents desktops has been replaced with HP Thinclients.

Key highlights of the solution offered:

- High processing power needed at the local Thinclient – We suggested a different Thinclient model (This was over looked earlier)

- The required minimal applications are installed locally – Open office, Client tools, Browser, Network printers etc.

- Physical Security is of a major issue in the remote locations – HP Quick Release Kit helped in mounting the Thinclients behind the Monitor

- HP Thin state enabled IT Admins to configure all the Thinclients from a single Thinclient

- Thin State also enabled the users to create a main image on pen drive and in case of any issue the user has to boot the Thinclient with the pen drive and the image will be ref lashed again. (No need to have an IT admin) – This was required much in the remote locations.