TravelingPC offers remote access alternative

Six months ago, Jason Hickock came flush up against the limits of his company's VPN. Remec, a San Diego wireless components manufacturer, had just bought the financial software application Hyperion for its two dozen controllers, stationed in offices from China to Finland. Although the controllers access Hyperion over the VPN, "the performance was terrible," Hickock recalls. So Hyperion suggested Remec add Citrix to access the application instead.

But Citrix was too expensive for such a small implementation. "We only needed 25 licenses, and they quoted us a price of $25,000," says Hickock, Remec's finance systems administrator. "After the price of the server, connection pack, training, software engineering, Web server, our guys said it would probably cost more like $30,000."

Hickock assumed Citrix was Remec's only option, but Rick Taylor, the vice president of IT, had heard of a small company called TravelingPC, which provides Web-based application and data access as a subscription service. Remec gave it a try.

Like Citrix, TravelingPC is a server-based product. Users log on to TravelingPC's data centers, where they view their application clients and My Documents folder. Users work as if the applications are running locally, but all processing takes place on the server. Only screenshots, keystrokes and mouse clicks are transmitted. TravelingPC's data centers connects to the customer's servers via a VPN.

"Our people access Hyperion from the TravelingPC site, and it runs pretty smooth," Hickock says. It's also solved another problem: Employees in the manufacturing plant in China were having problems accessing Remec's ERP system, Baan, over the VPN.

"The connection was so slow it would just time out," Hickock says. "But they can access Baan fine using TravelingPC. We originally bought 25 licenses, but now we're up to 75. The whole China operation is working through it."

As Remec learned firsthand, TravelingPC's architecture offers better performance and price benefits over Citrix. It also offers improved security over ExpertCity's GoToMyPC.

According to the company, users experience high performance, even over 14.4K bit/sec wireless connections. Instead of retrieving a 50-byte document and pulling it over a DSL connection, for instance, users view the document residing in the data center.

Also key is the ability to extend the life cycle of client PCs because client performance isn't reliant on processing power. There's no need to update operating system security patches, antivirus definitions, or maintain a personal firewall. The client device for the most part is irrelevant.

TravelingPC's subscription model is ideal for large companies such as Remec that need limited access to specific applications like Hyperion and Baan, and for smaller firms as a VPN alternative. The cost is affordable: $30 per month, per user, which includes the TravelingPC Instant Virtual Office desktop, and access to Microsoft Office applications and Outlook. Additional applications cost $2.50 per month, per user. A data synchronization application provides disaster recovery and data backup.