JAVA-BASED NCs NO PANACEA FOR THIN-CLIENT COMPUTING, HURWITZ GROUP STUDY SAYS

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Oct 5, 1998

IT consultants at Hurwitz Group Inc. are warning clients to carefully weigh the options for building thin-client applications. Despite excitement about Java-based Network Computers (NCs) being the "silver bullet" that solves the total cost of ownership (TCO) problem of managing large bases of dissimilar PCs, a new Hurwitz report concludes that other approaches are more effective.

The report, entitled Market Taxonomy for Building Thin-Client Applications, predicts that over the next three years more than 75 percent of new application development projects will be based on a thin-client architecture. The goal of a thin-client approach is to create more manageable, server-centric applications that provide better support for accomplishing difficult tasks like managing software configurations and version control. However, Michael Barnes, senior analyst for the firm's BalancedView Application Strategies Service and the report's author, says Thin-client systems will not fit all needs. "Many corporate users, including IT staff, graphic designers, and power users, still require traditional PCs for their processing power," he says.

Barnes says that by focusing on the real problem -- lowering TCO -- organizations can provide real benefits to users who will then be able to choose a solution based on their needs. Whether centrally managing applications deployed to traditional fat-client PCs, implementing clients with no floppy drives, or managing clients with no hard drives at all, organizations will be able to lower their deployment costs significantly.

Hurwitz Group sees an increased demand among IT organizations for solutions that extend applications running centrally from an applications server or mainframe (unlike Java applets that are downloaded at runtime and execute locally). In this scenario, the client functions like an intelligent display or user interface.

The report identifies the Internet as the driving force behind the interest in thin-clients. David Kelly, vice president of Applications Strategies for Hurwitz, says the Internet gives organizations an "opportunity to effectively open up parts of their internal IT systems to customers, suppliers, partners, and prospects. To address these opportunities, IT organizations should consider developing thin-client applications. However, performance over the Internet could be a show stopper."

To address some of these limitations, IT organizations will need to assign additional resources to understanding and implementing thin-client architectures. This includes the use of application servers, which are a key component of a scalable, thin-client architecture; application servers aggregate data from multiple, back-end sources.

Client applications leveraging server-based application logic are an excellent strategy for addressing the management issues associated with traditional client/server applications, says the report, which covers several of the large number of options available for building thin-client applications, including HTML, XML, and Java Applets. For more information visit www.hurwitz.com/. n