Customer - A leading
North American financial institution that provides a full
range of retail, commercial, corporate and investment banking
services to millions of customers internationally. Established
more than 150 years ago, this eminent banking institution
now maintains branch offices in more than 50 countries around
the world.
Business Challenge - During a network upgrade, the bank hit a roadblock when they
wanted to make a critical reporting application accessible
over the LAN in 90 branch offices. This software application
was only running on specific branch PCs with locally attached
serial printers. In order to extend availability of this critical
report, the bank needed to connect these printers to the LAN,
and move the application to a back office server. Therefore,
any eligible employee could run the reports on any of the
150 serial printers located throughout the 90 branch offices.
The Solution
Initially, the bank considered replacing the serial printers
with Ethernet printers. However, their specific software application
was not compatible with any Ethernet printers on the market
and therefore, could not print the crucial reports required.
If the bank changed to new printers, it would need to modify
the software application — which would result in  costly
downtime, business disruption and considerable expense.
Considering these factors, the
bank decided to network–enable the serial printers in
order to avoid changing the application. Therefore, it needed
a print share device that could attach the existing serial
printers to the LAN.
The bank wanted to standardize
on one print share device for all serial and parallel printers
found in the branches, but soon discovered that the numerous
branch printers were too removed from each other to place
on a single print share device. Instead, the solution demanded
single-port print share devices that would enable the bank
to network-enable each branch location’s serial printers
at a fraction of the cost of wholesale replacement. The institution
found success with Perle’s IOLAN
DS1, a single port
serial device server that connects to each serial printer
in the 90 locations and networks each device to the LAN.
Winning Results
The compact IOLAN
DS1 is an ideal solution because it performs
all the functions of a serial print server and provides the
bank with a flexible and reliable way of communicating with
the serial printers over the network.
This configuration delivered a
number of technical and financial advantages for this customer
including:
- Avoiding the expense and downtime associated with replacing
the host application and 150 serial printers
- Minimizing business disruptions across numerous branch
locations
- Achieving a new level of standardization at the branch
level
With the IOLAN DS1 solution in
place, the bank could quickly and easily enable serial-to-Ethernet
connectivity without incurring unnecessary replacement costs
— thereby improving its overall return on investment.
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