What financial institution would pass up the opportunity to cut branch computing costs by up to 70 percent?

That’s the order of savings Alabama-based EPL estimates its i-Power ultra-thin-client teller solution can deliver over a five-year period.

With an ultra-thin-client solution, the applications reside on the server not the desktop, and are delivered through a Java-enabled web browser -- that’s the key to the savings. The farther an application is from the server, the more expensive it is to run. Employing staff to manage software on a host of individual desktops is what gobbles up the budget.

Faced with new competition in a consolidating industry, EPL has remodeled its offerings using technologies from Oracle and Sun Microsystems. For the branches, a mainframe-based solution with Windows desktops has given way to a thin-client architecture built with Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). EPL is also porting its back-end core-processing software from a mainframe to UNIX servers running the Sun Solaris platform.

BF Goodrich Employees Federal Credit Union and Kern Schools Federal Credit Union, one of the largest credit unions in the United States, are both implementing the EPL solution. “We are trying to find a way back to centralized management,” says BF Goodrich chief information officer, Tim Powell.

Simplified, centralized management (and the savings that come with it) is precisely what these firms are getting. With EPL’s old client-server system, it took 25 hours to install new software in a branch. With i-Power, its thin-client solution, it takes just four. And whereas it took 16 hours to train tellers on the old fat client PC-based system, with i-Power’s browser interface, it takes just one. EPL is able to add product features 600 percent more quickly and fix bugs fast. Yet its development costs have fallen by 45 percent.

But that’s not the end of the story. Using i-Power’s new Java architecture, EPL is ready to take its customers’ costs down to a whole new level by eliminating the PCs they use today. These companies can say goodbye to high software licensing costs, desktop upgrades and security concerns such as worms and viruses. The transition will be made by installing a new type of hardware called a branch controller. This intelligent device will run the EPL application, provide the computing power for the desktops and connect to the data center. Best of all, the controller is configured by a smart card and managed 100 percent remotely by the data center, eliminating the need for local IT support in the branch.

The branch controller will run a network of Sun Ray “stateless” appliances. With no operating system or hard drive, the Sun Rays are the perfect solution for tellers, who need an efficient, powerful appliance rather than a full-function PC.

“We’ve already seen the benefits of moving from a Microsoft fat-client branch architecture to one based on J2EE, so Sun Rays were the logical next step,” says EPL’s chief information officer Michael Stoeckert. “When we have Sun Rays hooked up to a branch controller we expect the time it takes to install a branch will drop from four hours to about 15 minutes. The zero-administration branch is on the way.”

Click here now to learn more. For information about EPL, go to www.eplinc.com.