An HP executive had informed me some time back, while their consumer business team sell more notebooks than desktops, they sell more desktops surprisingly to corporate and enterprise customers.

I am quite surprised by this trend, because it just doesn't make sense to me. According to reports from Kaseya there are at least 10 instances of a failure a year per desktop on an average in India. Some of them I am sure are fixed by the user themselves, but a significant portion will need attendance of either the vendor or the IT team at an organization. This is gross productivity loss.

Cost of running a desktop for three years for approximately eight hours a day is estimated to be closer to Rs 100,000 ($2000) including the energy costs, downtime costs and support costs on an average. The acquisition costs are comparatively cheaper and are a fraction of the three year running costs.

So what’s the alternative? By that argument you’ll easily figure that even a notebook is expensive to maintain. Notebooks offer major energy savings and since the entire apparatus is rather compact, the maintenance issues are lesser. However you still have issues which are user related. Users downloading the wrong software, using software the wrong way and being indifferent to safe and secure IT practices. There's no solutions for all these, despite what your freindly IT vendor will tell you about the latest anitivirus software or desktop.

 And no enterprise can afford to buy notebooks for everyone at least not in India.

I know you’ll all be smirking when I suggest thin clients! “Come on, Thin Clients are dead! It’s an obsolete technology that never took off, and when you can buy a powerful enough desktop throwing another few thousand Rupees no one will buy thin clients,” argues a friend when I expressed my thoughts to him a few days back!

I agree thin client is not that cheaper than a desktop. With Intel launching the Atom processor, you can have a desktop at less than Rs 18,000 with a legal Microsoft operating system with a 17 inch TFT monitor, which can suffice the demands of 80% of users in an organization. But despite major energy savings an Atom still does not give you relief from your potential user related issues. It does not solve issues such as viruses, bots and and malware that infest 50% of corporate desktops, and attack every one of them at least once in a year.

Thin clients definitely are more stable, reliable and since it has no moving parts rarely fails. Even if one fails you can easily replace it, its an almost and plug and play and your desktop is back. You downtimes are likely to be only when the server or the desktop which serves the thin client itself fails.

But what about the power user. The guy who works with the AutoCAD, Photoshop or a Visual Studio IDE. No choice, but they need to have a desktop or a beefy notebook. I would say that if you have a power user, instead of providing the person with just another desktop give a workstation.

So how will it work in a typical Indian SME of about 100 users. I would imagine that around 20% of the white collar workforce will be executives or mobile workforce, and they will either user netbooks or notebooks. And of the other 80 users 80% will be usually be your regular white collar work force that does not really require anything more than your MS Office applications. They will all need to move to thin clients which will be served from a server farm of may be three to five powerful PCs with abundant memory and processing power. Needless to say these computers will be virtualized. The rest of the users will have powerful workstations at least beefed up desktops

Thin Clients will limit a user from using some power hungry applications, but it has its own benefits. When a user is limited to just a few applications, he or she does not spend the time in no productive work. Studies have proven that lesser number of  applications actually makes a person more productive.

I believe that organization must stop using and buying desktop applications even if it’s a client application, every app must be a secure web application that will reside in a demilitarized zone.

In the next two articles I will further explain what all the modern SME must invest in its IT infrastructure, and also elucidate how Netzary plans to solve several problems that such customers have.