By getting their business applications quickly and without compromise through a portal instead of by phone, or fax, or accessing the systems hosted at the data centre in Sumbawa, employees get work done more quickly; their increased productivity and mobility translate to added sales, bottom line savings or both.

Centralised access and streamlined application delivery also allows Diesh's IT shop to reduce the time and resources required to deploy, implement and manage its applications. In fact, it only took him two weeks to implement the solution to his users in Sumbawa, and remote users at the five other locations in Indonesia. The Citrix Consulting Services Group assisted in the roll-out.

The power of portal technology is more evident in its mining operations. Using a Dispatch System from Modular Mining Systems, Inc., one of its subsidiaries, PT Newmont Nusa Tenggara (PTNNT), is able to monitor information about mining activities in real time, including the position of a haul truck in the pit, how many trucks are waiting to be loaded at shovels, fuel burn rates and other system alarms and messages. This data, which helps them to optimise the usage of their mining equipment, is accessed via relatively low-cost, thin-client tablets using a wireless network installed within a 20-sq km pit area.

The technology has also benefited on-site engineers in the mines. In the past, at the end of each day, engineers had to manually update information on drill hole and blasting activities. This includes data on emulsion and cast primer usage, hole depth and blast patterns. Now, blasting foremen can provide accurate, up-to-the-minute data using applications on handheld PCs hosted on Citrix servers. This helps to provide PTNNT with a more accurate mine model.

While there were other application delivery technologies in the market, with his organisation's focus on cutting costs, Diesh knew he had to keep his expenditure for information access low. That meant he had to reject the other technologies that were looked at, such as virtual private networks (VPN). "VPNs were comparably more expensive and cumbersome especially when used in conjunction with wireless IP within our 20-sq km wireless pit area." It took just 15 minutes for Diesh to convince his management that a portal could help them access business applications on the go, 24 hours a day - a drastic change from the days, if not weeks, usually needed for such expenditures to be authorised. "Because the cost of the portal was quite low, there wasn't a lot of convincing to be done," he adds.