Over the years, one of the many evergreen topics in the IT industry has been thin-clients -- will we ever be able to move away from the PC model to get the majority of our work done?
Or are we forever doomed to lugging around laptops wherever we go?
Yes, the technology has changed. But has the context changed as well?
Will we see (finally) the concept of thin clients finally take off in the next few years?
Thin Is In
Over the last decade or so, I seem to remember various points where thin-client discussions were part of the landscape.
I remember Larry Ellison taking a run at it. I remember X/Windows and the X/Terminals. I remember diskless PCs that ran off the corporate LAN.
And, more recently, a growing cadre of web-based productivity applications from Google and others. And then there's our friends at VMware who are doing more work on virtual desktops and VDI.
So, why has the original idea never taken off, and why might it catch on this time around?
The Original Pitch Was Saving Money
Just like thin-clients, the idea of saving money will always be an evergreen pitch to IT types. But PC prices (desktops and laptops) have come way, way down, so there's not much of a price differential to sell into, at least on the hardware side.
And, in some cases, the use of a thin client means that all your applications would have to change -- something even the most powerful IT organizations don't want to tackle.
Yes, it's easy to imagine additional potential cost savings in ease-of-management, and perhaps licensing and a few related areas, but -- considering the magnitude of the change, the payoff has to be greater.
So if the premise is simply saving money, I don't think that will be (or ever was) enough of a motivator.
The New Pitch
I think the renewed interest in thin clients will come from two new directions -- security, and consistency.
It's not hard to make an encyclopedia of all the security breaches that have happened around information accessed (and stored!) on desktops, laptops, and -- increasingly -- smartphones. And that's just the ones we've heard about ...
At a fundamental level, I think that more and more IT organizations will be forced to better manage endpoint security -- not just access control, but information security. Make sure that precious stuff doesn't go to a USB port, or land on local storage, or (worse) get stolen and misued.
These same IT organizations are also going to want tighter control around the local apps that get loaded and run in the corporate environment.
If you were intrigued (like I am) around VMware's ACE offerings, you'll see the "secure desktop container" environment. IT organizations can provision a secure, virtual desktop from a central authority, control how it interacts with its supporting hardware (think disk, USB, network, et. al.), save it, examine it -- and do it all with very little regard for the underlying hardware. Very cool, if you haven't checked it out.
But recently, I've come to believe that there's a second, perhaps equally compelling motivation for thin-clients, and that's consistency.
I don't know if you're like me, but I have about a half-dozen interactive devices I use to get work done. I have my office laptop, my smart phone, the four or so PCs at home, and the occasional loaner PC when I'm in a remote EMC office.
None have the exact same interface.
None have the same versions of applications.
None have real-time access to my current working set of files.
And I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in two fruitless areas of pursuit: either synchronizing things, or figuring out how to work around them.
In the "wouldn't it be cool" category, imagine that everytime I picked up a device and authenticated myself, I was presented with a standard productivity environment that was mostly what I had on the other devices.
Same basic apps.
Same files.
Same preferences, etc.
Wouldn't matter if it was my laptop, my home PCs, my smart phone, etc.
I'd save hours and hours and hours. I'd also be more inclined to do work when the opportunity presented itself, rather than putting it off until I got back to "my" PC at the office.
Put the two together -- security and consistency -- and add in some decent cost-savings around provisioning and managing, and maybe there's enough motivation this time around.
And The Technology Has Moved Forward
We now live in a world where networks are getting much faster and much more ubiquitous. As an example, I don't know about you, but I get better bandwidth (and reliability!) on my home network connection than I usually do in the office. Wi-fi seems to work much better as well.
And you can see all the wireless carriers piling on the investment for mobile data services. Give it a year or so, prices will come down, speeds will go up, and it'll be part of the landscape.
The folks at VMware are getting pretty clever as to what they can do with virtual desktops. They're already at a point where you can run pretty well off of a thumb drive, so can we be that far away when the entire image (or only the bits that need to be sent) can come over a network? And VMware is doing additional work to connect VDI-style between presentation layers and back-end servers that might be running entire desktop images from a central facility.
At the same time, smartphones are evolving like crazy -- more performance, more storage capacity, more bandwidth, keys that can be used by human hands, screens that don't require magnifying glasses, batteries that last longer than a few hours, and so on. Boy, wouldn't it be great if I could ditch my smartphone for a new one every year, and just have it automatically come up with my entire context?
The security technology is getting pretty mature as well -- strong authentication, encrypted communication links -- can't make the "it's not secure" argument here.
So, Will It Happen?
I don't know, but certainly two things are true: the rationale has changed, and the technology has evolved to the point where it's not that much of a stretch any more.
So, why might EMC be interested in such a topic? That's easy -- we've never been able to offer our services for all the information that's lying around on desktops, laptops, smartphones, et. al. And if IT consumers decide to consolidate all of this information -- to better protect it, to deliver a better experience for their internal users, and hopefully save some money in the process -- that'd be big.
Really big.
Comments