Thin Clients: Desktop Users Slim Down

By MITCH WAGNER

Thin clients are starting to carry some weight in corporate America. Thin-client hardware is finding its way into mission-critical apps. And these lean machines are being used by all levels of employees, including front-line professionals and managers. Those were the findings of an exclusive InternetWeek survey of 100 companies conducted last month.

Memec Inc. is a prime example of the trend. The $700 million North American subsidiary of German holding company Veba Electronics Inc. deployed about 200 Network Computing Devices Inc. computers to a broad mix of employees. The users ranged from marketing directors who manage relationships with key customers to salespeople and accounting clerks. "We run the entire business based on the apps accessed through the NCD thin clients," says John Sisti, Memec's director of information services.

Memec's story is typical of the companies using thin clients. In fact, InternetWeek's survey found that use of thin clients is widespread. Some 64 percent of respondents say their thin-client users are middle management (44 percent) and top executives (20 percent).

Another 53 percent of the companies had thin-client users who were front-line professionals, such as doctors in HMOs, accountants or engineers. And 20 percent of the companies surveyed had users who were salespeople of big-ticket items, such as industrial equipment and real estate.

But the lower rung of the corporation wasn't slighted, either. Seventy-five percent of companies say they deploy thin clients to low-level salespeople (23 percent), and to clerical (38 percent) and manufacturing workers (14 percent).

That's a fairly diverse bunch, but the com mon denominator is that they're not primarily computer users, explains Jeff McNaught, senior director and general manager of Wyse Technology Inc.

"They don't sit around and stare at computers all day; if they do, it's just one means to an end," McNaught says. "The PC is not the central component of their work, as it is to many of us."

Citing examples, McNaught says call-center operators who use thin clients are primarily concerned with helping customers. Managers are primarily concerned with overseeing employees, and doctors are focused on treating patients.

How are businesses using thin clients? Although 62 percent of respondents say they use them to access an office suite like Microsoft Office, several companies use the devices to run mission-critical apps. Some 51 percent of respondents run accounting apps, 46 percent run transaction-processing and order-entry applications, 35 percent run engineering applications and 31 percent run Enterprise Resource Planning applications, such as SAP AG's R/ 3.

Thin-client installations do tend to be small. About 43 percent of respondents have fewer than 50 seats deployed, and 65 percent have fewer than 500 seats deployed. Likewise, the overall IT installations tend to be small.

Sixty-four percent of respondents worked for companies with fewer than 1,000 desktop systems of any kind, and an additional 19 percent had 1,000 to 5,000 desktop systems deployed.

Memec's Sisti says small companies migrate to thin clients because most big companies have already deployed vast and sophisticated PC systems and installations, whereas smaller companies are still in the early stages of information technology deployment.

"In big companies, you've got a large PC population out there that was established prior to a stable and reliable server for thin clients," Sisti points out. "But anyone thinking of replacing desktop systems right now would be foolish not to look at thin clients."

Also, small companies are most likely to be using UnixWare or some other termi nal application system, which makes them prime candidates for thin-client replacements, says Greg Blatnik, an analyst at Zona Research Inc.

Indeed, while conventional wisdom says thin clients are used primarily to replace dumb terminals, that's not what InternetWeek's survey found. Eighty-two percent of respondents report using thin clients to replace PCs. Unix workstations were being replaced in 29 percent of the cases. Twenty-six percent of respondents say thin clients were replacing terminals and in 17 percent of cases, thin clients were replacing Apple computers.

But Zona's Blatnik sees no contradiction between the conventional wisdom and the survey results; most of the PCs being replaced are running terminal emulation software, he explains.

At AT&T Wireless Services, meanwhile, Wyse WinTerms are replacing about 325 legacy PCs that range from 286s to 486s, with a smattering of old Pentiums. The systems are running primarily terminal emulation, with Microsoft Exchange for E-mail and Micros oft Office for office automation software, according to Rod Crownover, western area infrastructure manager at AT&T Wireless.

According to the InternetWeek survey, 74 percent of respondents are using thin clients to access Windows apps. That's another apparent contradiction to the notion that thin clients are being used to replace terminals. Yet Wyse's McNaught says thin clients are being purchased so that users who require terminal access also can access Windows applications.

And sometimes Windows access is just a temporary measure. Brock Freeman, information technology director at mortgage company Mila Inc., says his company hopes to migrate away from Windows apps. The company has deployed about 45 network computers from NCD, accessing a Windows server running a proprietary mortgage banking app. The company is rewriting the application using WebObjects, the Web development tool from Apple Computer, which will run on a Sun server.

The Unix application will be deployed in August, Freeman says. "Windows NT is crap; it crashes all the time," he adds.

The NCD desktops are key to the transition because they can be used to access both the Windows app and the coming browser-based application, Freeman says.

Seeking Simplicity

Saving on the total cost of ownership and reducing complexity are the primary motivations for companies installing thin-client hardware. That wasn't a question on the survey, but it was a uniform theme in about a dozen follow-up interviews.

"When you have a less complex desktop node, you cut down support costs dramatically. The more complex the node is, the tougher it is to support," says Crownover at AT&T Wireless.

Crownover runs thin clients in about 100 remote retail stores in 10 states, with no IT staff in the stores. "You can configure one in the data center in about five minutes, ship it out the door and the user plugs it in and it runs," he says, adding that the cost is about $1 ,200 per site vs. between $2,500 to $3,500 for a PC.

Moreover, there are fewer moving parts to break, and, with no floppy drive, there's much less of a security risk: Proprietary corporate information can't find its way onto a floppy disk and out the door.

Reduced cost of ownership and hassle are key reasons Chip Childress, director of information systems at Holston Medical Group, Kingsport, Tenn., bought thin clients. The health-care group deployed about 250 Wyse WinTerms, and plans to boost that number to 400 by year's end. The company has 55 doctors in the group and 350 employees overall. The thin clients are used to access medical records, including patient charts.

The Right Approach

Health care is a compute-intensive occupation. Each doctor works with several nurses and assistants, with patients waiting in four or five examining rooms. Each of those examining rooms must have a computer to access patient records. Holston Medical Group calculated that the PCs it needs would cost abo ut $3,000, compared with about $1,500 for the WinTerms.

Moreover, supporting that many PCs would be a full-time job for two people, but support for the WinTerms is a part-time job for one person, Childress says. And each PC must be configured manually, whereas the thin clients can be configured remotely from a single server.

"With the WinTerms, I keep an extra unit onsite at the clinics and if there's a failure, I can walk the average person through a setup in 10 minutes," Childress says.

Users interviewed by InternetWeek say the ability of thin clients to run a variety of applications in different environments is another prime selling point.

In the survey, users were given a choice of nine different types of applications that could run on thin clients and were asked to select as many as they used. These included Windows apps, as well as E-mail, browser-based apps and terminal emulation. Users chose an average of 3.6 different types of applications.

For example: AT&T Wireless uses thi n clients to access host applications via terminal emulation and Windows apps running on a Windows NT server. Memec runs X-Windows software on its thin clients to access its sales automation software, which runs on Unix; the company also runs VT220 terminal emulation to access a host-based accounting application, and some users run personal-productivity applications on a Windows NT server.

Thin-client hardware also finds its way into places where PCs simply can't go. Thin clients are often used on factory floors and in other areas where ruggedness is a key criterion, says David Pinckard, vice president and general manager of Tektronix Inc.

Exploring another option for expanded PC use, Wyse is designing low-emission and wireless thin clients for health-care systems.

"Now, the doctors run around with manila folders, and they stick a tongue depressor into the patient's mouth, scribble some information down and grunt, and away they go," McNaught says.

McNaught says PCs are unsuitable for medi cal environments because of the electrical interference they cause, which interferes with medical instrumentation. But a wireless thin client can speed the entry and access of data. And the thin client is easy to use. "For many doctors, anything more complex than a television puts them off," McNaught says.

Room For Growth

From a market-share perspective, thin clients are still disappointing. Zona Research predicted in March that all thin-client hardware vendors combined would ship 650,000 units this year. In contrast, Apple sold that many units in less than a week in 1997, even as headlines screamed how the company was failing.

So while thin clients are hardly the darlings of Wall Street, this much is true: The ongoing perception that thin clients are the exclusive province of secretaries and low-level clerical workers is wrong. These machines are running core business apps. And they're used by high-level executives and professional workers-trends that are likely to continue.