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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These budgetary pressures have started to make a new generation of thin clients attractive even though the difference in price between a low-end PC and a thin client has narrowed.
“The cheapest thin client we make is £189,” says Stephen Yen, general manager, EMEA of Wyse. “If you were a retailer rolling out shops nationwide, the cost of sending and loading a PC with software and sending a technician to install it would probably be worth the same price as the thin client, which you can just ship in a box.” The total cost of ownership of a PC is even higher than a thin client's because a PC needs more electricity and has more moving parts, which are prone to break and generate more heat. The result, says Yen, is a total saving of between 25% and 30% when thin client computers are installed.
But while thin clients have always offered a strong 'total cost of ownership' story, what is making them more appealing today is that the difference in functionality between a thin client and a standard PC has narrowed significantly. Once regarded as dumb terminals, thin clients now support graphics and many of the same capabilities as a PC, except for hard drives. Wyse and VXL have differentiated their products by improving specifications and manageability while maintaining the inherent advantages for enterprises of thin clients.
Like their PC cousins, some thin client machines use faster microprocessors, others have a PCI slot for wireless networking and more still have flash memory so that applications can be installed locally if necessary. Some thin clients, including those made by Wyse, come with their own management software, while HP partners with Altiris for deployment software.
One key part of the growing acceptance of the thin client is the increasing reliability of today's servers. Falling costs of back-up technology has also helped.
As a result, the National Health Service and other normally risk-averse organisations in the UK are regarding thin clients as safer investments. Until recently, relatively small implementations were the norm. But the biggest growth today is coming from customers wanting to kit out thousands and even tens of thousands of users, says Lewis Gee, UK managing director of Citrix Systems, which developed the thin client capabilities that Microsoft incorporated into its server software. And these projects are not just in call centres and point-of-sale machines, either, but include many enterprise-wide schemes.
However, many CIOs have still to be won over. Others, such as Martin Ellison, the head of IT for Britannia Building Society, would like to roll out thin clients but are held back by other factors. “We have 3,000 desktops. We've standardised in various areas, but there are a number of PCs running different combinations of applications. All that creates complexity - even with co-existence testing to see which applications work well together on the desktop - and we get a high incidence of errors that lead to support calls and fault-fixing activity. Then there's the whole complexity around software distribution. We'd make a big inroad into that with thin clients.”
Ellison has been looking at implementing thin clients for the last seven years or so, but despite his best efforts, he still cannot roll out the technology because the suppliers of some of his key applications are still not accessible through a browser. “I believe in the business case for thin client, but it's just a matter of convincing software vendors to move in that direction.”
As Ellison has discovered, most thin client software problems stem from legacy applications or poor development techniques, rather than fundamental problems with thin client architecture. But even newer applications do not always come with a thin client version.
A number of industry initiatives are addressing this difficulty, however. Citrix, for example, has established a network of almost 200 developers to ensure that as many applications as possible run as well as possible in a thin client environment. Microsoft has issued guidelines to developers about how to write “great terminal server applications,” says Tennant.
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