I went to the Gold Coast and What did I see???
I have just returned for a relaxing break over our Anzac holidays at the Gold Coast.
We went to Sea World and Wet and Wild, as well as just hanging around the pool at the hotel drinking cocktails... anyways it was well worth the money. We stayed at the Outrigger Sun City Resort at Surfers Paridise and it was absolutely superb. Room was excellent, water coastal views, buffet breakfasts Australian style, great service, excellent pools and waterslides, and most important;y the cocktails were to die for.
But while I was doing the tourist thing around the Gold Coast, I walked into an internet cafe there to check my email. Went to the counter, asked for 30min worth and he gave me a smartcard. WHen I sent to sit down I found that they were using Sun Ray thin clients instead of PC's that are usually used. I asked the person about them and he gave me the same type of pitch that I would give to our customers, and it's just refreshing to see that customers actually get the benefits that they are told about when they eventually use the product. They were running Windows fullscreen using RDesktop running it on Solaris 10 x86.
He explained that he has smartcards for his regular users (like a membership card) who absolutely love the fact that when they go there, they plug their card in and continue to use the terminal where they left it. He is even thinking of creating a billing infrasturcture to go with it, so his regular customers can subscribe to the service, and get billed monthly or quarterly.
For the casual users he uses smartcards so he has a timing system, that the customer buys some time, he initialises the cards credit with the time, and when the card is inserted it basically counts down. When you remove the card the timer stops. So when the time runs out the sessions suspends, and if the customer wants more time then he/she just buys more buy bringing the card to the cashier, buying more time, and when this is done the session is resumed from where they were. If they don't want to renew the time, the session then after a timeout
He is now looking at using Secure Global Desktop to not only offer access to desktops locally but offer desktop aplications to his users remotely. Being able to log into there Windows session, not only within the Internet Kiosk place, but also anywhere where there is a web browser, and many of his customer were interested in this service.
This business wasn't very big at all, like around 12 thin clients, and a couple of PC's for those who still really really really want to use them. I was just sooo impressed that the thin client message has gotten out to even such a small business as his, and that out of all the technoligies he chose ours as this means he can offer, Windows, Linux and Solaris desktop and applications to all his users.
So here I sign off as I have heaps of work to do, so until next time... Arrivederci!!!!
Posted at 01:44PM Apr 26, 2006 by sunraybruce in General |