George Deyett

"We've been asking for this," says George Deyette, a network design manager at Polaroid who is evaluating the Intel tool.The tool will eliminate the need for end users to enter configuration information.About half of Polaroid end users need help-desk assistance to configure their Shiva clients now, he says.

George Deyett said he is looking to Web caching as a way to save on WAN bandwidth.

"Using caching engines can cut down on the huge amount of 'net traffic," said Deyett, telecommunications operations manager at camera maker Polaroid Corp. in Waltham, Mass. With Web caching, frequently accessed pages are stored on a server at the user site so employees access them there rather than over a WAN link, he explained.

Deyett is an advocate of products that enable users to initiate database queries and receive only screen updates, as opposed to an entire information transfer, over the WAN."Screen updates require much less bandwidth than whole transactions," he said.