Sometimes you just must have the latest technology, and swallow the associated risks of being the first to use it. We talk to the companies that couldn't wait.
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Contents 
Servcorp
Ausmelt
Suncorp
How to be an innovator
Executive Summary |
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However, as with all rules, there is an exception -- if the technology in question will be a business differentiator, then sometimes you can not afford to wait and it is worth taking the associated risks. In the first article of what will be an ongoing series in Technology & Business, we profile companies that couldn't wait for the tried and tested -- companies on the bleeding edge of technology.
Virtual Finance Australia
Virtual Finance Australia (VFA) has been in business since 1998, arranging many different types of financing for its clients, from home loans and debt consolidation to commercial loans and equipment or construction finance. More than AU$200 million of finance is currently under its management.
Clients are referred to the company by a network including major real estate agencies, accountants, financial planners, and insurance companies -- VFA needed a way of providing these people with secure access to its custom-built CRM system.
Managing director Tony Bulic tried Citrix Metaframe and Microsoft Windows Terminal Services, but said they were too cumbersome and presented too many problems. The company now uses a ThinPoint server appliance from NetLeverage. This device makes Windows XP and 2000 applications available to thin clients without requiring Terminal Server or Citrix.
It's common for appliances to be based on Intel processors, but NetLeverage uses the inexpensive Philips TriMedia processor, which is normally found in products such as CD or DVD players. The "secret sauce" is a compiler developed by NetLeverage's founder, CTO, and CEO Steven Hasani, that harnesses the processor's four stages in parallel, resulting in performance comparable to a 2.4GHz Pentium Xeon, according to the company.
VFA's system has a backend application server running the CRM application plus a single client running on an inexpensive PC. The ThinPoint shares that client among up to 40 concurrent users. Hasani points out that the client PC -- not the ThinPoint -- is the source of the 40-user limitation, and that an additional PC is needed for every 40 concurrent users. The constraint on the ThinPoint is bandwidth rather than throughput. Hassan estimates that with this application a single ThinPoint could service around 1000 concurrent users (the theoretical maximum is 10,240 users). That said, he suggests most organisations would install a second ThinPoint in a high-availability configuration long before that limit was reached. "It's a very scalable environment," he says.
"ThinPoint is very easy to use and very adaptable to my business," says Bulic. Adding users to the Citrix system was "like pulling teeth" but very simple with ThinPoint. NetLeverage sells VFA the exact number of licences it needs, rather than blocks of licences that typically remain under-utilised, he says. (In fact, ThinPoint CALs are sold in blocks of three, but that's sufficiently fine-grained for most purposes.) This is especially important for VFA, as it expects to grow from the current 1500 users to 10,000 in around six months. That sounds rapid, but signing up a single estate agency chain can bring in thousands of users in one go. "The beauty of this is that I only pay for what I use," says Bulic.
Citrix is more appropriate for businesses that are large enough to employ their own technical staff, he suggests.
The ThinPoint delivered 100 percent uptime in the two months between installation and our interview. "It didn't miss a beat -- it's working brilliantly," says Bulic. "It's a thousand times better than Citrix or Terminal Services... It's the most robust system I've used for remote access."
He's clearly a very satisfied customer, but what made him decide to take a chance on a relatively unknown product and supplier? Bulic says all his questions were professionally answered by Hasani ("the man deserves every praise" he says), and the equipment was provided on a 14-day free trial. That latter point was an important one, as Bulic was tired of buying hardware and software
"A startup is the hardest thing to do," says Chris Howells, consultant at NetLeverage. It's necessary to provide superior features, a better price, or both, and to "over service" clients from the outset, for example through "try-before-you-buy" arrangements.
The same technology is used in NetLeverage's NetPoint and wwWebGuard products. NetPoint combines firewall, antivirus, anti-spam, file server, Web server, and mail server in a single appliance. wwWebGuard provides Web content filtering and access control according to user or computer.
Taking into account the price, reliability, and ease of operation: "You can't go past ThinPoint," says Bulic. "It's brilliant -- I speak from the heart."
