Thin clients in, PCs out at Verizon Wireless

Verizon Wireless is hip deep in a project to replace thousands of call center PCs with Sun Microsystems’ thin client terminals. And the carrier is already counting up the savings.

With about 5,000 Sun Ray terminals installed at three Western call centers, and a fourth in progress, Verizon has seen a 60% to 70% drop in desktop problems and a 30% decline in electrical use at each center. The carrier plans to keep rolling out Sun Rays in new and existing call centers.

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The deployment is Verizon’s first for a large-scale thin client architecture, part of a growing enterprise trend to virtualize the desktop. NEC just introduced a virtual desktop offering, called the Virtual PC Center, with traditional Wyse thin clients, integrated VMware virtualization software and client support for Citrix.

The carrier’s new approach emerged in fall 2005, when Carl Eberling, vice president of information technology for Verizon’s West Area, asked his team for ideas to cut IT costs at existing and new call centers. The conclusion was that thin clients on desktops, with the applications running on servers, would have to be replaced much less often than PCs, and would cut capital costs but, more importantly, also cut management and support costs.

The thinnest of thin clients

Sun’s Sun Ray is unique among thin clients, many of which still use some kind of embedded Windows or Linux operating system, even though the applications are shifted to servers. In such architectures, the video display is redirected over the network to the desktop thin client box for processing and display.

“There’s nothing on the Sun Rays,” says Michael McGuinness, senior member of technical staff, who co-designed Verizon’s architecture and helped oversee the deployments. “Not even a light OS. That’s where the cost savings come in.”

The desktop box contains only some firmware that puts the display video onscreen and talks to the Sun Ray server software, which tracks everything about the user and the user’s session.

Call center reps now have an arm-mounted 19-inch flat panel display, with the compact Sun Ray box on a desktop perch. Users power up the Sun Ray by inserting a personal smart card for two-factor authentication, type in their Windows username and ID, and within seconds can begin working with the server-based applications. In the near future, this same smart card will be used as the employee ID entry card to enter the call center.

This system replaces the Windows PC stored under the desk. “We had to reboot it often,” says Doug Robertson, customer service coordinator at Verizon’s Chandler, Ariz., call center, the site of the first deployment. “They [tech support] were forever upgrading the PC, adding more memory. And I had to wait for the programs to load, I had to reboot, turn it off, turn it on. [With the Sun Rays,] I haven’t seen anything go down in this call center in four or five months.”

A related user benefit is dubbed by Sun “hot desking.” A rep or a supervisor can simply pull the smart card from the Sun Ray without logging off, which causes the display to revert to the standard log-on window. Then inserting the card into any other available Sun Ray brings up the log-on screen, and after a valid logon, the user’s complete original session reappears, just as it was when he pulled the card from the first Sun Ray. Supervisors can stop at a rep’s desk and approve a customer credit right there, or a rep can move from a sit-down to a standing workstation, or a team can form and move to a group of Sun Rays.