Keeping in touch

Personal computing has become part of everyday life, with our dependence on access to systems so ubiquitous and transparent that even delivery drivers are wearing devices to remain connected with corporate applications.

Universities and businesses are investing in fuss-free, environmentally friendly, thin-client devices to ensure local and remote access to central computing resources. And even building sites have become so dependent on personal computing devices and corporate resources that companies are providing portable broadband wireless access points.

Mark Crawford, IT technical support officer at construction company Cala, says the dependence on BlackBerry devices has increased eightfold in the past two years.

“We are primarily house builders, with more than 40 construction sites across the UK, and all 450 of our staff are tied into the corporate network,” he says. “We have a large infrastructure, Citrix thin-client technology, a lot of notebook computers with 3G network cards, and wireless capability that extends across our building sites.”

With the edges of work and personal life rapidly blurring, computing has become even more individual, with mobility and portability remaining of high interest to an increasingly mobile workforce who want to remain connected to their applications and contacts 24 hours a day. At automotive parts manufacturer and distributor ZF Trading, for example, between 95 and 99 per cent of employees use a PC at some point during the working day, says IT and finance director Roger Scholes.

“The implementation of the hardware has not changed in the past few years,” he says. “But the amount of use has increased, as well as the way in which we use the data in our computer systems. We now want to analyse and learn from the information rather than spend all our time putting it into the system.”

While IT leaders remain interested in handheld computers, desktop personal computers are not on the wane, and the two will co-exist for some time, says Nick Jones, vice president at analyst Gartner.

“Small screens are only so good,” he says. “But I anticipate we will see the first mobile phones with a video output socket later this year, and then the non-laptop-lugging business trip may well become a possibility.”

Gartner says that for most organisations looking to buy desktops or notebook PCs, price is a consideration but not the primary factor. The ability to provide appropriate services and global support are important considerations, and organisations are working with suppliers that can meet requirements to reduce the total cost of ownership.

But for some organisations ­ – notably government and education ­ – price is a key factor, and many public sector institutions are looking for new and innovative ways of reducing cost while continuing to deliver the applications and functionality that their employees require.

Frazer Muir, director of information services at Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University, says PCs are overrated and overpowered for most uses. “We could put a powerful computer on a desk and most application needs would rarely even touch at its full capabilities ­ – and yet we would pay for that extra performance,” he says.

One of the drivers for change at the university was the building of a new energy-efficient campus at Craighall. “With a building designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible, it would have been crazy to put 30 PCs that consume too much power and pump out too much heat in a room without then installing air conditioning,” says Muir.

The answer for the university was to create a mass switchover from PCs to an IT infrastructure based on thin-client computers, in combination with a strategic change to centralised computing.

“Our strategy was that the thin client should look and feel as close to a PC as possible,” says Muir. “To do that successfully we had to deliver about 150 different applications. All our students now notice is that they have a nice 17-inch flat screen, rather than a chunky 15-inch monitor.”

Each of the 1,200 Wyse V50 Linux-based thin clients consumes only 17 watts of power, compared with up to 200 watts on a conventional desktop PC. “It’s not just about power,” says Muir.

“We now benefit from a five or six-year replacement cycle, rather than the three-year one we had for PCs, and there is so little to go wrong that if they develop a fault we just swap out the device, put it in a Jiffy bag and send it back.”

Every year, experts are keen to suggest this will be the year that Linux replaces Microsoft Vista at the enterprise desktop level and yet, according to Laurent Lachal, open source research director at analyst Ovum, companies are still choosing not to implement Linux.