With energy costs rising and PC administration increasingly time consuming, medical products maker ResMed knew it was time for new ERP and document-management systems as well as an assessment of its entire IT infrastructure. In September 2008, ResMed decided to replace 160 PCs with Sun Ray 2 Thin Clients, and purchased two SPARC Enterprise T2000 Servers with chip multithreading, and four Sun Fire X4440 Servers to support its new solution.

The thin client solution improved user and IT productivity and supported easy remote access. According to ResMed, IT productivity has increased by the equivalent of two additional IT staff, and the company has saved about $267,850. The Sun solution also increased security and substantially reduced energy costs as well as the noise-level.

"In electricity costs alone, we saved about $7,500 in one year," said Paul Williams, head of IT Infrastructure Europe for ResMed. "We have gained the productivity equivalent of two employees in IT, which is urgently necessary given our strong growth. All together, I estimate our savings at about $270,000."

The slim terminals of the Sun Ray 2 Thin Clients do not require a local operating system or local software. Employees use a smart card, which is a credit-card-sized card that plugs into the terminal for authentication and login. With smart cards, data is not stored locally. This along with the fact that the smart cards meet the standards of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Basel II Accords, delivers high security for its clients. With a successful login, employees acquire their personal work environments. Applications run on a server, which enables a Java application to run in a Web browser and display the applications to users. If connections are lost, the server continues to run and maintains the work session until the employee logs in again.

The Sun Ray 2 Thin Clients and Sun Ray Software provide ResMed employees with access to both line-of-business applications and their standard Windows desktops. The Sun Ray thin clients drive two screens, so employees can work on two applications and e-mail at the same time. This alone has resulted in a 30% increase in productivity from employees who use two screens.

Other benefits from the Sun solution reported by ResMed have included:

• Simplified training: employees can carry an extra smart card to try new products without having them physically installed; employees have completed about 4,800 hours of training.

• Reduction in administrative time and costs: setup for a new employee takes only 10 minutes. In the past, the company used personal computers, and it took two weeks from ordering to implementation.

• Security improvements: ResMed also gained highly secure remote access and reduced the company’s vulnerability to data theft by eliminating the PCs.

More Information

Customer Snapshot: ResMed

Sun Ray 2 Thin Clients

Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 Server

Sun Fire X4440 Server

Sun Ray Software

Sun Secure Global Desktop Software [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter