Jan. 4, 2011

 

Hughes Network Systems, LLC unveiled a managed branch server offering designed to reduce IT infrastructure and operating costs while enabling "Branch of the Future" applications for the distributed enterprise.

 

Businesses in the retail, financial, hospitality, and restaurant vertical industries are seeking to improve employee productivity and enhance the customer experience by launching richer applications, which demand ever more bandwidth and IT infrastructure at each site. The Hughes Virtualized Branch Server offering addresses this challenge head on, enabling businesses to easily host multiple critical applications on a single managed platform. Both centralized or cloud service applications, and those that must reside at branch offices to satisfy high availability and performance requirements, are supported on the new Hughes platform.

 

Businesses can provision the platform with vertical industry-specific applications tailored to their specific needs. Some examples of this flexibility include:  

 

• WAN optimization, which creates additional 'virtual bandwidth' to and from the branch, improving performance for centralized and cloud-based applications;
• Live and on-demand training and learning solutions, using video and rich media to improve workforce productivity;
• Loss prevention and video surveillance, to reduce shrinkage and improve security;
• Interactive digital signage, for engaging in-store customer communication; and
• Virtualized desktop environments to replace expensive dedicated PCs.

 

With the Hughes Virtualized Branch Server offering, businesses can reduce the number of servers at their sites while keeping essential applications locally for high performance and reliability. Branch virtualization enables the IT department to better utilize their local branch infrastructure, improving efficiency, application availability and performance while lowering IT costs dramatically.  

 

Unlike standalone do-it-yourself solutions, Hughes installs, maintains, and manages the branch server platform, enabling businesses to spend more time managing their operations.  

 

"As businesses look to upgrade their aging IT infrastructures, they can benefit from our new virtualized branch server platform that eliminates the need to deploy multiple single application servers at branch locations," said Mike Tippets, vice president, Hughes Solutions Group. "They can easily host their own applications, such as WAN optimization, training, business television or digital signage in single or multiple virtual machines, for the utmost in flexibility. The bottom line is the Hughes Branch Server offering brings the benefits of virtualization to all enterprises with distributed sites in a fully managed, affordable, and easy-to-deploy solution."