Telesur is the largest telecommunications company in Suriname, a small South American Dutch-speaking nation with a population of about 560,000. The company’s 15 IT technicians are responsible for managing the entire infrastructure of the corporation, including servers, network and security, as well as more than 1,000 PCs.

Seeking a Low-Cost, Easy-to-Manage Solution

The cost of regularly purchasing and maintaining PCs for the company’s more than 800 employees was prohibitive, and expected to increase significantly as more computers neared replacement. In addition, Telesur’s IT technicians spent far too much of their limited time updating and repairing the PCs, which are spread across multiple branch locations.

The company recognized that it needed to find a smarter solution — one that would reduce costs for the long run, and enable IT staff to spend less time fixing PCs and more time on business-critical initiatives.

Less Cost, Maintenance with NComputing

Working with IT consultant Design IT, Telesur evaluated two thin client providers before selecting NComputing. NComputing could provide full-featured thinclient workstations at a lower price than traditional PCs. Additionally, Telesur felt confident in the superior local support provided by Design IT.

“It is a big advantage for us to have someone local who can help us with our problems, instead of trying to get support from another country where they might speak another language,” said Marciano de Kom, project manager for the NComputing deployment. “When we have questions, someone is here in one minute to help us.”

Telesur implemented NComputing workstations in multiple phases, beginning with front-offices at headquarters and seven branch offices. In just one week, Design IT helped the company deploy 40 NComputing L300 workstations.

As a temporary failover solution until the company purchases servers to host the 40 workstations, each branch location uses a host computer serving up to eight thin clients that can automatically take over if the host at another location fails.

Telesur successfully runs multiple applications on each NComputing workstation.

“We weren’t sure that all our applications could run on thin clients, and we were concerned about how much bandwidth we would need, but the solution has worked well. The thin clients and all the front-office applications are running smoothly,” said Marvin Lee, Telesur’s manager of security and IT infrastructure.

Savings of $40,000 — With More Expected

Every NComputing thin client saves Telesur $500 over traditional PCs, for a total savings of $40,000 thus far.

Along with the cost savings, the thin client solution reduces the demands on Lee’s IT staff. Centralized management with the L-series allows his staff to manage applications and configurations without having to make changes to every workstation.

“Before, we had to address each PC individually,” Lee said, “but now we save a lot of time because we can solve problems at the host level, without having to work on each client.”