Financial services can, with the help of the enterprise appliance, benefit from changing their approach to software licensing, traditionally a high cost area. The alternative involves paying for applications on a per-use basis instead of on total number of seats.
Global e-commerce player, Sun Microsystems has developed technology that provides financial services with the ability to lower their IT costs. The simple low cost "plug-and-work" appliance, the Sun Ray, lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) with centralised management and increases user productivity.
Banks and other financial services can benefit from the relatively uncomplicated technology Sun Ray offers. For years, services have been chained to two-system desktop, one for enterprise applications and another for PC productivity solutions. This is set to change, as financial institutions around the globe are discovering.
The stateless Sun Ray enterprise appliance supports "hot desking", so you can access your customised desktop and continue working from any enterprise application on the local network. Each user also has a SmartCard which allows you to move from one computer to another and continue working where you've left off. The SmartCard is therefore user-friendly, cost effective and increases productivity.
Unlike personal computers, which require an operating system and applications running on locally on a desktop, the Sun Ray system allows instant access to existing applications and resources on the network within the workgroup. This is regardless of the underlying platform, whether it is Windows NT, Sun's Solaris Unix-based platform or other environments.
The Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank) conducted a pilot project with the Sun Ray enterprise appliance. Scotiabank is representative of many large, global financial services organisations and is committed to network-based computing.
"The Sun Ray enterprise application solution is very consistent with its own view of how to achieve thin-client benefits. We were looking for a simple, standarised, low cost solution that could be swapped out easily and that has virtually no maintenance and support costs," says Gail Smith vice president of Scotiabank.
The Sun Ray architecture counters unnecessary expenditure. One of America's foremost research companies, the Aberdeen Group describes Sun Ray as 'poised to redefine the distributed-computing model of the networked fat client PC executing enterprise Web-based applications'.
The enterprise appliance easily connects to platforms and Web-based systems, while eliminating the need to perform desktop upgrades. And with Sun's large installed base in the trading floor arena, Sun Ray strategically connects the trading floor which the rest of a firm's infrastructure
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