Computerworld - Every year, Dave Raspallo, CIO at Textron Financial Corp., found himself having to replace a third of his 1,200 PCs. But he grew tired of the cost of the annual ritual, and he began swapping out his desktops for thin clients. Forty percent of those PCs are now gone, and many more will disappear next year.
"I would consider it a failure if we don't eliminate completely the use of any desktops," said Raspallo, who has a name for his project: STIMI, or "Stop the Intel-Microsoft Insanity."
And he isn't stopping at the desktop. He's giving road warriors handhelds and tablet PCs in lieu of laptops. Total savings will be around 25% annually for his Providence, R.I.-based company, most of it in reduced support costs.
In the press for efficiency and cost reduction, data centers have been centralized and servers consolidated. And now attention is increasingly focusing on the PC. There's growing evidence of a determination among IT managers to aggressively cut PC hardware and support costs by centralizing management and minimizing Microsoft Corp. licensing fees.
Jack Klosterman, CIO at Volkswagen Credit, is as determined as any of them.
Three weeks ago, the Libertyville, Ill.-based financing arm of Volkswagen AG began a pilot project using PC blades and thin-client appliances from Hewlett-Packard Co., with plans to roll out 200 PC blades next quarter. One way Klosterman expects to reduce Microsoft licensing costs is by virtualizing the desktop.
Employees access applications via a solid-state desktop appliance. They can log into a PC blade from any appliance, so they're not tied to a specific desktop. With at least 10% of the employees out of the office at any given time, VW Credit can reduce the number of CPUs and, consequently, its Microsoft licensing fees. "It seems to have realistic potential for this," said Klosterman.
The fact that the appliances can last twice as long as PCs while requiring less support also yields cost savings.
Bruce Blitch, CIO at Tessenderlo, Kerley Inc.
The licensing savings come from controlled access to applications. Keystone Automotive has some 3,000 users, but only half of them have a regular need for Microsoft Office. "When you deploy a PC, you have to provide Office knowing that they may be sporadically using it," Arriaga said.
He will have 1,500 Office licenses on his servers and will manage user access from the data center. When his servers hit the Office license limit, he will need to buy more licenses, but until then he's paying only for what he uses. The project is 60% complete, and the goal is to move up to 95% of Keystone Automotive's users to thin clients over the next year.
Arriaga expects other CIOs to look at the thin-client alternative as well. "It's on the path to being widely accepted," he said.
John Stingl, chief technical officer at Russell Investment Group in Tacoma, Wash., is moving his 1,000 users to a Citrix environment to cut costs. He's using thin clients from HP's Evo line that run local versions of Windows XP along with a browser and multimedia players. Applications are delivered via a central server.
Jeff Skeen, CIO at Golds Gym International Inc.
The Linux Line
Linux-based desktops that access Web-enabled applications are getting the attention of many IT managers as well. But it may be unrealistic to predict that the Microsoft-loaded PC is facing an imminent threat from either thin clients or Linux.
"There is a long history of people talking about the thin client taking over the world," said Bob O'Donnell, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC. O'Donnell said he inherited some "outrageous forecasts" from earlier analysts, who predicted huge advances in thin-client adoption.
In 1999, for instance, IDC forecast 9.5 million thin-client shipments in 2004, O'Donnell said. Today that estimate is 1.8 million, only about 1% of total PC shipments. Still, the thin-client growth rate is over 20% annually. "The challenge has been to raise the awareness level," O'Donnell said.
But Steven VanRoekel, a director of platform strategy at Microsoft, countered that the Windows-based desktop remains a healthy, low-cost approach. He also cited failed thin-desktop movements of the past. "We've seen this trend, and the waves rise and fall," he said.
Microsoft does offer thin-client options through Web-based applications and its Terminal Server, which is part of the Windows server operating system. The company also partners with Citrix to help companies deliver applications to remote users.
But VanRoekel said the company continues to believe that a "rich, high-fidelity client" is the best course for most users. Microsoft is working to make the client deployment process easier with the release of its next Windows operating system, code-named Longhorn, which is expected in late 2005 or 2006. A new feature, called SuperFetch, will help applications launch more quickly, and ClickOne installation will allow users to install an application by simply clicking an icon or link.
That said, users are unquestionably buying thin clients. Indeed, some vendors offering desktop PC alternatives have fared much better than other technology companies over the past couple of years.
Neoware, for instance, reported a 68% revenue gain for its fiscal year that ended June 30. And Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Citrix reported a revenue jump of 21% year over year for the third quarter, which ended Sept. 30. The vendors say a key driver of sales is security, as well as regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
Many of the thin-client vendors, such as ClearCube Inc., are privately held and don't report their revenue. But the Austin-based maker of of PC blades claims that it has about 500 corporate customers.
And those HP PC blades that are being piloted by VW Credit will become generally available in March. HP claims that the blades have the capability to replace half of all desktops in medium-size and large companies .
The Linux desktop is a different story. In the U.S. market, vendors see more opportunities for Linux in call centers, point-of-sale systems and technical workstations than for replacing so-called knowledge worker systems used for office productivity and business functions. But that's not to say IT shops aren't examining Linux alternatives on the desktop.
In particular, many IT managers say they're keeping a close watch on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice productivity suite. The Mayo Clinic, for instance, has 10 machines loaded with StarOffice and OpenOffice, a free open-source office suite, as part of a study of Linux and thin clients. Ken Bobis, chief technical officer at the clinic's Scottsdale, Ariz., location, said he knows those office products work. "Clearly, we may have pockets where we want to deploy them," he said.
The Mayo Clinic, which already uses Citrix for some of its 4,200 desktop clients, is investigating replacing more stand-alone desktops with thin clients as a way to cut licensing and support costs. It plans to continue using Office as well, but if the clinic deploys Office only on desktops where it's really needed, it could reduce the number of Office licenses by a third, said CIO John Cranmer.
Although Sun says StarOffice is compatible with Microsoft file formats, some IT managers remain concerned.
"People who have struggled through the maturing of the Microsoft products, I think, are reluctant to go back to being in the minority again," said Dennis Biederman, vice president of global IT services at APW Ltd., an electronics parts maker in Waukesha, Wis.
And while there's plenty of interest in Office alternatives, it's not enough to prompt a switch for Cornell University's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management.
"As a business school, we can't consider products that the companies who hire our students don't use," said Larry Fresinski, the school's CIO. "We suspect that Office will be the mainstay for Fortune 500 companies for some time to come. However, if there's a shift, we would shift as well."
Some IT managers clearly prefer to control costs through improved desktop management rather than by moving to thin clients.
Bruce Blitch, CIO at Tessenderlo, Kerley Inc., a Phoenix-based chemicals maker, is concerned about the performance of server-based computing with remote locations. Controlling desktop support costs is accomplished through "tyrannical control" of desktop systems through the use of Windows 2000 lockdown policies that prevent users from installing applications on their PCs, he said.
One problem facing thin-client adoption is user resistance. Jeff Skeen, CIO at Gold's Gym International Inc. in Falls Church, Va., said 30 of the company's 37 corporate-owned locations now run thin clients, and the remaining seven will be converted in March. He said over 650 franchisees will be offered the system in its current format in July.
"The big challenge we have with the corporate staff is that employees are used to having their own way with their systems," Skeen said. "What we've tried to do is keep a real close eye on the administrative staff and how they're using their PCs, so when we put the thin client in, it's not a huge loss of freedom."
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