This article is more than 1 year old

CIOs: VDI? Maybe, just maybe, it really will be different this time...

Tech bosses endorse thin clients, throw hands in the air over millennials

You can never be too thin...

In smaller or more diffuse organisations, this might be a little trickier. One attendee recounted joining a fairly substantial organisation which had the appropriate ISO certifications on paper – but certainly not embedded in the minds of the IT staff.

After pushing individual responsibility, they got the heads of department in for some training on exactly how data protections regs worked and what the penalties could be for breaching some of them. “That two-day workshop scared the crap out of them.” Yes, when individual responsibility doesn’t do the trick, individual liability can.

Of course, as one attendee said, Windows 10 (let’s face it, everything since Windows 95 arguably) is “far more complicated than it needs to be to deliver a solution”.

“I’m trying to find a better solution to deliver what actually now only needs to be a web browser, because we moved all our applications to being hosted,” he explained. “Rather than having to spend all the money on a fat PC and an operating system and Office and everything else.”

Yes, there’s a considerable cost our brave CIO said, but: “If you’ve got 2,000 users you can put two-thirds maybe onto a different solution that provides all the functionality they need to run the application without the other bits.”

Then this lucky tech boss went on to to tell us that an R&D team is examining no less than four options, including an Ubuntu terminal and a stripped TV box.

Yes, a CIO with an R&D department, developing their own tailored platform. But what options do the rest of our table have for controlling their users?

This is the point at which one attendee stood up and declared: “I’m X, and I installed thin clients.”

OK, he didn’t actually stand up.

Thin clients saved my life

“Initially there was huge huge resistance to it,” our brave CIO admitted, but added: “Over time it became the norm. And once it became the norm, it was just such a pleasant environment, it was so much more controllable, easier to scale, to replicate to maintain, to manage. The support tickets just dropped through the floor and it just became a calmer easier place to be.”

If it was extraordinary to hear one of our CIOs making such a wholehearted endorsement of a technology, it was uncanny to hear, even feel, the murmurs of agreement around the table, with a fellow attendee adding that after undertaking a similar programme at 10 sites around the UK, “problems dropped away to nearly nothing".

Every organisation is different though. Another attendee had also carried out a thin-client rollout, and agreed that the problems of administration and security vanished into thin air.

But eventually, users rejected the machines except for a solitary accounts clerk, who had just one specific task. It hadn’t been picked up just how important it was for sales people to be able to show clients video.

A failure? Not from our CIO’s point of view.

“I think it’s important I learned the lesson when I did, before the maturing of the market. The business wasn’t ready for it, but in our job things change every day,” the CIO said. “It’s in our job description to continuously try new things and learn what is possible now.”

But these projects don’t just happen. They have to be paid for. And as one attendee pointed out, replacing the entire desktop estate is a big ask.

So, we’re back from Utopia and into the world of business cases.

How do you measure collaboration?

Unfortunately, our friends at the vendors have slightly muddied things of late, emphasising more touchy-feely aspects alongside traditional justifications.

And it’s not like our attendees think enabling better collaboration and unleashing creativity is a bad thing. It’s just how do you get that into a spreadsheet?

As one attendee with a rather massive fleet of PCs to plan for asked: “How do you measure collaboration – the value of connecting people to create great ideas. That’s the part I struggle with.”

Someone suggested there are methods to map even these intangibles, such as “reputational or damaging incidents". While collaboration could be correlated with a reduction of the travel budget.

But that’s thin clients we’re talking about. The future is full desktop virtualisation, isn’t it?

Maybe. As one attendee with a vendor background asked: “Every year is the year of VDI. Why is it, if it’s go great, only 20 per cent of corporates are on VDI?”

To which a fellow roundtabler quipped: “I thought it was the year of the Linux desktop.”

Either would be a revolution – and perhaps that’s part of the problem. Few CIOs get the opportunity, the board support and the cold hard cash to revolutionise their infrastructure.

A fellow roundtabler said a lot of it is down to capex: “If you’re going to put in a big VDI estate, it’s a lot of money to pay upfront. If you have to put in another desktop it’s just one more desktop.

“You can use the existing infrastructure for the terminals, but then you’re virtually buying everything twice in some respects. And the cost at the back end is still fairly substantial.”

Another concurred, saying the cost of delivering a VDI experience equivalent to a traditional desktop just isn’t worthwhile on the mass scale – for now at least, but added: “It feels like that balance is getting much closer. We do have distinct user segments for whom we think remote desktops make sense, such as locations requiring a more secure desktop solution, offshore development centres, to support flexdesking, and so on.”

One roundtabler summed up the history of thin clients: “The difference between thin clients and fat clients is that people can tell. If they couldn’t tell, this conversation would be academic because we wouldn’t tell them.”

But our CIOs were overwhelmingly willing to keep an open mind on the latest generation of VDI. If they decide that now you really can’t tell the difference – and of course they can make the numbers work at the back end – should we expect an awful lot of fat clients to be trimmed in the near future?

Let us know below. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like