South Africa's large geographic areas make it ideal for use of information kiosks that enhance the travel experience of holidaymakers and sales representatives. In the United States, the national rollout of such an information kiosk system, running on Sun technology, for a US car rental company is proving highly successful.
The kiosk system is designed to enhance the travel experience by giving access to a variety of local information, using a simple touch screen, the Sun Ray Enterprise Appliance, Sun Enterprise servers and Java technology for Alamo Rent-A-Car.
According to Peter Castle, Senior Systems Engineer at Sun Microsystems in South Africa, the large geographic areas in this country would be ideal for similar solutions to be established.
"The multifunction - video, sound, smart card and graphics - capabilities of the Sun Ray make it the best choice to deploy at the desktop, kiosk, single tasking device and in the future POS. This allows local companies to take advantage of standard spares holdings, standard maintenance and standard help desk procedures.
"This would be a great cost saving compared to legacy fat client desktop systems with operating systems, disk, and non-centrally managed architecture," says Castle.
For example, travellers can print a directory of hotels, restaurants, department and speciality stores, and entertainment venues, complete travel book-style descriptions of preferred locations with addresses, telephone numbers, driving directions and maps - all from the convenience of the kiosks.
The multilingual kiosks will be deployed in more than 50 locations in the US within the next two years.
"Robustness and reliability are key to the success of kiosk deployments. The Sun Ray and Java platforms provide that for Alamo," says Castle.
According to Sylvia Berens, vice president, Apunix, who developed the software solution: "When Alamo asked us to develop a unique kiosk solution for its US locations, we immediately looked at Sun technology. Based upon our experience with Sun, we realised that having a Sun server and Java technology at the heart of this kiosk and deploying Sun Ray systems would be the ideal solution for Alamo."
Keeping kiosks updated and current, as well as up and running, is critical to the success of a kiosk deployment. With Apunix's Kiosk Software using Java technology, content can be dynamically configured rather than "hard coded," making updates and changes to the kiosk easy and inexpensive to perform.
The Apunix Kiosk Software was designed using Apunix's Kiosk database connectivity tool, which enables rapid builds of kiosk content linked to existing databases. The databases can be text, graphic or multimedia, and the tool is compatible with most standard database formats.
According to David McKee, director of Customer Innovation, Alamo Rent-A-Car: "This kiosk system is graphically and functionally rich, making it dynamic and inviting for users. We expect customers to look to these kiosks as a valuable source of local information whenever they visit a particular city."
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