Serving equipment leasing needs across Canada, National Leasing’s IT department is responsible for supporting nearly 100 remote users, in addition to some 300 employees at the Winnipeg headquarters. Previously connected via a slower-than-desirable VPN, remote users had to bring in or send their systems to HQ for maintenance and upgrades, resulting in frustrated users and a drain on productivity.  Five years ago the company transitioned to a VMware® View™ virtualized desktop infrastructure to address these issues.

“Initially we recycled some old desktops,” said Dominic Slack, National Leasing Network Support Analyst. “There were lots of headaches doing that so we wanted to find something more compact that would leave more desk space for the user.”

Unfortunately, the company’s initial scaled-down choice turned out to be a poor match for the company’s needs, said Slack. Reliability was inconsistent and employees had a lot of complaints.

In addition to better serving its remote employees, National Leasing had implemented virtualization with the goal of supporting a more robust disaster recovery plan.

“Our risk department manager determined that for business continuity purposes we needed to have a few representatives from every department able to continue working via a virtual machine in the event of a system shut down,” said Slack.

Clearly, inconsistently reliable performance was not an option to support this important objective, while malfunctioning hardware continued to hamper productivity and burden IT resources.

The IT team began researching zero client alternatives, taking a look at several
models.

“On paper we liked the looks of the ViewSonic SC-Z55,” said Slack. “It had the right price point and features, so we brought in a couple to test and were very happy with them.”

They quickly started replacing underperforming clients with ViewSonic SC-Z55 discrete zero clients and currently have a mix of the zero clients on the floor, said Slack, adding that as soon as there’s a problem they now swap in a ViewSonic SC-Z55 zero client.

As of Q4 2015, National Leasing has been using the ViewSonic discrete zero clients for about 3 years, and the IT team continues to upgrade to the SC-Z55 whenever an older client goes on the fritz.

“The ViewSonic client is notably better,” said Slack. “One of the biggest benefits is that they support dual monitors much better than our older clients. The SC-Z55s come with 2 DVI ports, which handle the dual monitor needs better than the one DVI and one VGA we previously had.”

In addition, he added, The SC-Z55 is smaller and takes up less space, and just seems to be all-around more reliable.

“They just work better – they’re more reliable, always connected, and the video resolution is better.”

What have users had to say about the change?

“Our users are kind of funny. They just like things to work,” said Slack. “As long as the mouse moves and they can see what’s on their monitor they’re happy. The ViewSonic SC-Z55 covers that for them and they’re a pretty happy bunch. We hear no complaints from them.”

This holds true for the all-important business continuity employees as well: help desk requirements from these users are substantially down compared to what they used to be, said Slack.