with a traditional Windows GUI and supports selective serial devices.
Australian IT service provider Datacom Connect has introduced thin clients to its call center operations to make its business more agile with the ability to respond to on-the-fly campaigns of 100 seats or more.
With over 2,000 staffers in three countries, Datacom needs to be able to provision urgent upswings in head count without little prior planning.
The company boasts a blue chip client base, including Microsoft Corp., IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and General Electric Co.
Datacom systems manager Tim Leehy says the company began a trial of thin-client technology late last year with 25 units. “We needed a solution that solved a very important business need for us:
urgent head-count upswings caused by new call center business coming on board at a moment’s notice,” Leehy says.
Datacom incorporates an Aspect telephony system using agents running on PCs preconfigured for each client running with Microsoft Terminal Server. The programs are run on Dell 1850 servers driving the PCs as clients in a kiosk-style environment for the operators.
While Datacom used desktops for existing business needs, it faced a challenge when new business requirements were added because it took too long to set up the new PCs. As a result, the company selected Wyse Technology Inc.’s S30 because it supports the Aspect dialer via RDP 5. 5.
“These stateless, very small units are ideal for the desktop or mounted to the back of the monitor,” Leehy says.
The S30 runs the Microsoft Windows CE operating system
“It also features an embedded Web browser in which the Aspect application is run. The Aspect application also runs via terminal services sessions,” Leehy says. “The trial showed us that thin clients were ideal instead of PCs, as we were able to set up a new account for 100 seats within a few days.
“The fact that, operationally, the Wyse S30 looks like a PC to the user but is diskless and stateless means set up and deployment is a breeze,” he says.
“The small Flash-based memory means quick start-up, and all units can be quickly and centrally managed. More importantly, thin clients give us a standard operating environment across all terminals,”
“We needed a
solution that solved
a very important
business need for
us: urgent head-
count upswings
caused by new call
center business
coming on board at
a moment’s notice.”
tiM LEEHy, systEMs MAnAgEr, DAtAcOM cOnnEct
Leehy adds. “With PCs, no two units are the same for very long, and security is an issue. This means reduced operating cost as they have no moving parts.”
Datacom now has an emergency set of 25 S30s at any one time in storage ready to go online when a new client pops up. The company is also looking closely at replacing existing PCs used for existing clients as a future initiative.
Wyse’s northern region sales manager, Ward Nash, says the company is also considering replacement of PCs used for existing clients as part of a future IT initiative. “Datacom now has an emergency standby to quickly meet new business needs; it gives them a commercial advantage over other call centers that are weighed down by PCs,” Nash says.
Earlier this year, Wyse showcased a new concept in thin-client architecture known as N10. Although the N10 thin-client hardware uses fewer chips than any previous device from Wyse, what really makes it different is its intelligent software that legislates where software is processed.
The hybrid processing architecture, which uses a multicore system-on-a-chip technology, has the ability to encode and decode any file type, including VoIP, but it is the software that determines whether to process that type of data on the server or on the system on a chip.
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