Thin clients: Not just ROI

For as long as I've been following alternatives to traditional "fat client" desktops, most vendors have been touting thin client and related technologies mostly in the context of better return on investment (ROI).

They'll admit that up-front costs are higher. They'll even reluctantly concede that the user experience (in the sense of response time, adding a unique application, and so forth) may not be as good as for a traditional PC. But, the pitch goes, management costs will be so reduced that you'll make back your money.

As for the users? Well, so long as the thin client pitch has been mostly about gear for call centers and the like, it's hardly surprising that IT buyers often haven't put of a premium on richness of experience for that class of user. It's about the basic function.

The resulting business that this approach has driven has been respectable enough--especially for Citrix--but it's been fundamentally niche-y. Something for specific uses and users, rather than something broader.

One reason is that, to be frank, a lot of buyers don't believe ROI claims. The size of an up-front check you write is something tangible. Purported savings over the next three years? Not so much. Especially given that the savings are often "soft costs" that posit things like lower management costs or higher user productivity. Vendors may not be able to justify literally anything with the right ROI study. But they can try.

Moreover, justifying thin client computing strictly on a cost basis depends on these sorts of soft cost savings. After all, in a typical thin client architecture, you still need a desktop device (with a hardware bill of materials that isn't really all that much slimmer than that of a regular PC) plus you need all the back-end servers and software to deliver applications.

As a result, suppliers of complete (hardware/software/services) thin client solutions have started emphasizing two other benefits of thin client computing: compliance/security and user experience benefits.

The compliance and security aspect is pretty obvious. If data and applications aren't stored locally on a user's PC, they can't "walk" out the door. And, in general, it's pretty commonsensical that centralized applications and desktops would be easier to control whether we're talking software licensing or enforcing data retention policies.

In fact, the only thing that surprises me is that vendors didn't more widely focus on this aspect on thin client computing before now. To be sure, there's a broader awareness of data security issues, more compliance regulations, and more remote contract workers today. But ClearCube, an early "Blade PC" company, built its business largely on demand from three-letter government agencies and others for whom security was a front-and-center requirement. So antecedents were there to see.

It also shouldn't be a surprise that the historical "cheaper but not as good as a PC" storyline around thin client computing never had a whole lot of grassroots support. However, today, we have faster networks (both wide area and local area); this helps at the infrastructure level. Perhaps fundamentally, we're starting to see a variety of application and desktop virtualization approaches.

The specifics differ considerably but these new (and "reimagined") forms of virtualization collectively focus on delivering applications and operating systems to a user PC in a controlled way. For IT, this means a thin client-like degree of centralized management. But users still have a conventional desktop--or even notebook--so they retain the PC experience. And that experience can be even better to the degree that their operating system and applications can be easily refreshed ("de-crappified" to use the technical term).

Think of it as a sort of hybrid client model. In fact, this model has even broader implications in that it means that IT can selectively control and wall off parts of a PC without necessarily taking control of the whole thing.

This, in turn, means that many of the past justifications for PCs as locked-down corporate assets no longer apply. But that's a topic for another post.

[idfubar]

Is it possible that someone aside from Apple can benefit from the common net-connected PC becoming all but unusable?

[mikedatl]

Don't forget about the power consumption. An IDC study showed that 80% of the power consumed by IT is outside the datacenter. Granted, most IT departments never see that since it's absorbed by facilities most of the time, but that doesn't mean it's not there. Just taking your average PC that consumes 108 watts of power and replacing it with an average thin client that consumes 7 watts of power is huge - especially when you have several thousands of them. That's a hard OpEx cost that can be seen and measured although it takes a little coordination with facilities and IT. Of course, if you're talking to the CFO then he/she sees both sides of the house and can directly chop that number out of the budget. I've seen measured power savings in the millions within the first year of thin client deployment. This is just the tip of the iceberg on the OpEx side with real, measurable costs. I too don't like soft cost analysis so I try to stay away from that. NOTE: I do work for VMware, not a thin client manufacturer.

[RobertPogson]

This is misleading:
"They'll admit that up-front costs are higher. They'll even reluctantly concede that the user experience (in the sense of response time, adding a unique application, and so forth) may not be as good as for a traditional PC. But, the pitch goes, management costs will be so reduced that you'll make back your money."

On a UNIX/Linux terminal server, thin clients can be much faster than the usual Windows Terminal Server because 'NIX operating systems use shared memory. The first user peels the application from the hard drive/file system but the next users share the executable code and get instant access to it.

Thin clients that boot via PXE cost very little to deploy. It is plug and play like a telephone. Server setup is little different than setting up a normal desktop client except that there are services like DHCP/DNS/TFTP/NFS, most of which you will have with 2003 server anyway.

With thin clients, one person can setup, deploy and manage many more thin clients with much less effort than thick clients. The up-front costs are much less by about half if you use GNU/Linux and do not have to pay per-seat licence fees.

Please, do not spread myths.