The lean machine
- Article 67 of 77
- Information Age, January 2004
The business case for axing PCs in favour of thin client devices is finally firming up
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History, as doubtless any student of the computer industry will point out, tends to go in cycles.
When interactive computing took off in the 1970s and 1980s, the predominant model - indeed the only model - was centralised processing, with mainframes (and later minicomputers) sitting at the centre. Employees communicated with the system through 'dumb' terminals that were little more than a means of displaying characters (in block mode) and passing these blocks to and from the processing engine.
There were obvious shortcomings to that model - frustrations that were highlighted when the PC came along in the early 1980s and provided users with local processing power. That autonomy heralded the development of client-server computing, in which most applications logic was held not centrally but run locally on the desktop.
It took half a decade of rollouts for the inefficiencies of that model to become clear. Spreading all that computing power throughout an organisation just made it harder to fix things when they went wrong, more difficult to ensure everyone used the same software, more tempting for would-be thieves, and easier for security breaches to occur. With the advent of Internet computing in the late 1990s and the possibility of delivering applications over the web to a browser, the PC's function looked increasingly over-engineered, and calls went up that it should be replaced by something much less costly to buy and maintain - in a phrase, the network computer or the thin-client device.
The argument did not win over everyone immediately. Even now, half a decade later, sales of thin client computers are still far outweighed by server-attached PCs.
But in recent times, demand for thin clients has started to surge. According to IDC research, the conventional PC market grew only 1.4% in 2002, but the thin client market expanded by 19% - albeit on a total number of units shipped worldwide of only about two million. (Almost 150 million PCs were shipped in 2002.) An even bigger growth rate is expected for 2003, say analysts.
As customers roll the devices out in greater numbers, suppliers are making their move. “It's a very big opportunity for us,” says Shaun Hobbs, Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) UK head of commercial desktops. HP had originally partnered with Wyse, the biggest seller of thin client computers, but after seeing the market figures - and the forecasts - it decided to develop its own range. “It's a hardware revenue stream for HP, which is something we haven't focused on this hard for a couple of years,” he says.
HP is not alone in renewing its interest in thin clients. After past attempts stalled, Sun Microsystems has upgraded its Sun Ray thin client systems and is throwing substantial sums behind a sales and marketing drive. It is also, in Silicon Valley parlance, eating its own dog food. Rolling out thousands of the $700 machines, which come with Sun's desktop software, has already cut millions of dollars off Sun's IT costs, says CEO Scott McNealy. The company has also saved millions by reducing power consumption “by not having a Wintel 'space heater' in each of our offices,” he says.
The intensified push by some of the world's biggest computer makers underlines how far the market has come. Alongside them, the pioneers of the market - including Wyse, Neoware and VXL - remain powerful, say analysts. Equally, Microsoft, which develops two of the most popular operating systems for thin clients (CE.Net and Windows XP Embedded), has begun a marketing campaign based around the services for thin clients available in Windows 2003 Server.
“There's great demand,” says Mark Tennant, Microsoft's Windows servers product marketing manager. “With IT budgets being reduced while the demands placed on IT departments are increasing, many customers are looking for a way to have a centralised, secure, managed solution.”
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