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Information at everyone's fingertips |
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Efficiency Up, Costs Down |
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Thin Client Technology |
Like many restaurant groups, Groupe Chez Gerard establishments used to have their own PCs running a mixture of applications, some networked into the Corporation LAN, some not.
There was a clearly a need to introduce a structured means of establishing and standardising the applications software in use across the group. Having differences between establishments meant the management level staff moved from one location to another found themselves unfamiliar with the systems available for them to control the business; and it made head office assimilation a complex - approaching impossible - task.
Now management and staff at each establishment use Thin Client Technology to access all of their applications software and databases all located on a Central Server Farm. Due to the very low bandwidth overhead of Thin Client Technology 64kb Leased Lines are used to connect restaurants to the Server farm.
Information at everyone's fingertips
At head office, Restaurant information is easily kept up to date as all of the data is located centrally. Yet, local managers can access information about their restaurant as easily as before – more easily since that information is now more sensible, and uniformly structured.
All data is now backed up securely, too – at the servers central location where the thoroughness of the back-up can be closely supervised. The group uses mirrored servers which means that a catastrophic failure can occur without the end users at head office and restaurants noticing anything amiss.
The design, implementation and on going management of the IT Infrastructure out sourced to Insite Ltd. Group Chez Gerard recognise that they are restaurateurs, not IT specialists. They are masters in their restaurant business so they devolve the running of their IT infrastructure to a company which is master in that.
As a consequence the metamorphosis from irregular stand-alone IT units to the Thin Client Environment was completed both on time and under budget according to Jason Danciger, Commercial Director of Groupe Chez Gerard.
By migrating their IT infrastructure to a Thin Client Environment, Groupe Chez Gerard managed to do the impossible – centralise management systems and control yet give restaurateurs instant access to all the information they need to plan and run their businesses at a far lower cost then ever before.
Efficiency Up, Costs Down
In spite of the advantages, Groupe Chez Gerard’s spend on IT as a percentage of business turn-over has actually started falling and the new thin-client infrastructure is expected to pay for itself inside two years in visible savings alone. The detail of running the business more efficiently comes as free.
A new restaurant, for example, needs only a Thin Client Terminal at a cost of about £500 rather than a fully featured PC at nearly £1200. And given that the Thin Client Terminal needs no lengthy installation of application software it is ready for action in minutes.
But the big source of saving is in support costs, says Danciger. “We used to have to visit each restaurant individually to fix a problem or install new software. Now with Thin Client, both are done centrally.
Thin Client Technology
According to James Barden, Managing Director of Insite, Thin Client Technology has huge appeal to many organisations and is particularly applicable to the Hospitality Sector, where organisations have many remote sites with a small number of users in each.
It is a common theme that companies want to increase functionality and efficiency whilst reducing the cost of delivering applications and information to the business. Thin Client Technology provides the catalyst to do just that. Our customers report significant cost savings in three areas:
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The cost of supporting the end user decreases substantially as all applications are running on a server located in the computer room. Thanks to features such as “Session Shadowing” that provides Remote Control of User Sessions, it is no longer necessary to send expensive support resource to individual users when their PC breaks down. |
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Due to the low bandwith required to connect to a Thin Client Server Farm, organisations do not have to upgrade their Local or Wide Area Networks. Typically, a 64Kb Leased Line connection to a remote site will support up to six concurrent users for most applications. |
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Windows Based Terminals can be deployed that cost half as much as a traditional PC. This is good news for growing number of people who do see the sense in using a 1Gb Pentium processor for Word Processing or Data Entry. Advantageous as it is, a Thin Client Implementation has to be carefully planned if it is to provide reliable, trouble free service. We follow a tried and tested methodology that includes a Proof of Concept Pilot and User Acceptance Training before rolling out a solution company wide. |
Once installed, Thin Client solutions are extremely scalable and new applications can be rolled out in hours instead of days. We recently had to add two hundred users to a corporate network following an acquisition. In reality it took us just over a week – three days to add two new servers to the existing server farm and four days to roll out the client software to existing PCs – good going in anybody’s language.
The other hidden benefit of a Thin Client environment is the ease with which the Application & Data Servers can be moved to an outsourcing environment. Many organisations find the idea of locating Servers off site very attractive but cannot justify the huge annual cost of the telecomms Links that are required for traditional PC Networking.
A Thin Client Enviroment requires very little bandwidth per client connection which means that the telecomms links can be much smaller and therefore less expensive. This makes a clear business case for outsourcing as it becomes easy to cost justify.
Insite are Thin Client Technology Specialists endorsed by Microsoft, Citrix, Hewlett Packard and Compaq. Our Customers include Groupe Chez Gerard Plc, Bradford & Bingley Plc, The Royal Navy, Canterbury City Council, CPG Logistics and companies in most industry sectors.
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