Thin and Thinner: Wireless Poised to Shake Up Thin Client Landscape - Industry Trend or Event

ENT, Oct 11, 2000 by Joseph Mckendrick

While the actual connections over wireless protocols is small, about 22 percent of the companies now support wireless hardware: 19 percent have employees using palmtop computers and 5 percent issue WAP phones, with some overlap between the two.

Applications

The most prevalent application delivered through thin-client systems is e-mail, cited by 89 percent of sites with thin-client systems. Another 83 percent offer thin-client access to databases, and 81 percent offer thin-client connectivity to file and print servers. Another 73 percent offer access to personal productivity applications.

Interestingly, 55 percent of this group also offers accounting or financial-based applications through thin-client architectures. More than two out of five sites -- 42 percent -- also link thin clients to ERP/enterprise business systems.

Of course, thin clients play well to the application server provider (ASP) model, since it becomes irrelevant where servers and applications reside. "We are actively planning to install a vertical ASP using a thin-client model," says the IT manager of a major Southern financial services company. "In our part of the financial services industry, we expect thin-client solutions to dominate the delivery of applications software. Our only dilemma is whether to implement it exclusively for this company or make it a separate enterprise and offer it to competitors."

It's important to note that simply deploying thin clients doesn't improve the quality of applications. According to one respondent, "I work in a university environment. Very often we are asked to support the most poorly written software on earth. This causes a great deal of difficulty at the desktop level. Using thin clients speeds up the delivery of the problem software to our end users, but not necessarily in getting the software to work properly."

"There is a learning curve when supporting Microsoft and other PC-based applications as well as managing users," cautions a utility IT manager, who currently supports 110 thin clients. "Also, software vendors have not designed well for multiuser environments. Some applications, such as Microsoft Publisher, do not allow individual customization when running off Windows NT Server. Or, the individual settings for Microsoft Word are lost when applying Microsoft patches to the server."

Hardware

By far, older Intel-based PCs reign as the hardware of choice for most respondents' thin-client hardware choices. Eighty percent use older PCs with x86 and low-power Pentium chips. Windows-based terminals, which are essentially PCs without disk drives, are used by 48 percent of this group.

New thin PCs on the market from major vendors are popular. "We have been using Compaq iPaqs for our accounting and support staff for a few months now," says one respondent. "While these are not as much thin clients as they are light PCs, they definitely are a welcome addition to our organization, offering top performance for low cash in areas where older machines had been gasping for life."