Success Story: FlashFX-Symbol-Industrial

Datalight® FlashFX® Enables Symbol® to Easily
Deploy One of its Most Successful Products

The Challenge

Symbol® Technologies, Inc. is the leader in enterprise mobility solutions that create new advantage through streamlining supply chains, empowering people to do more with less, and driving productivity and profitability. The company designed a new line of rugged, portable data terminals that wirelessly link workers to data and to each other in transportation and logistics environments such as warehouses and docks. Their sales distribution strategy consisted of using a large network of value added resellers (VARs) to create custom solutions for end users worldwide.

For this approach, Symbol needed an efficient way for their reseller channel partners to configure and download a custom Windows CE image to solve specific customer business problems.

The Datalight Solution

Symbol chose Datalight® FlashFX® because of its source code availability and
Datalight’s willingness to create a customized solution. To allow for easy,
drag-and-drop image creation and efficient downloading of the custom programs,
Datalight modified its flash media management software, FlashFX, and created a
custom Dynamic Link Library (.DLL) for Symbol. Symbol integrated the .DLL
into Terminal Configuration Manager (TCM), a graphical software tool for resellers that allows them to quickly and easily build images and download them to hundreds of units simultaneously. This approach made it very easy for their VARs to create custom solutions. Symbol also integrated FlashFX into their design to manage NOR flash memory. FlashFX’s ability to provide atomic writes to flash helped ensure that the captured data was reliably stored. 

The Customer Payoff

In addition to its lightweight, rugged form factor, and integrated laser scan engine, the new PDT 7500 data terminal was extremely successful because it was straightforward for resellers to create and load custom applications to non-volatile flash storage with easy-to-use tools based on Datalight FlashFX. The PDT 7500 was successfully deployed into many different transportation and logistics applications and became one of Symbol’s most successful products.