Making Critical Reporting Applications

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.