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In spite of what has been going on with many of the '.com' companies, the bottom line is still important - a company must make a profit to stay in business. One of the most effective ways to increase profit is to reduce costs. Therefore, many managers are trying to determine the cost of operating a piece of equipment beyond its initial purchase price. This longer term cost analysis is known as discovering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a product.
In 1997, The Gartner Group revisited a study that they had done 10 years earlier and produced a 27 page report on calculation of TCO as it relates to personal computer use. You can read the entire study online (Gartner Group TCO Study), but here is the basic conclusion: As complexity increases, so does TCO.
The report breaks out the complexity issue into two parts - Management Complexity and IT Infrastructure Complexity. In the Management Complexity part they consider such things as the amount of decentralization present in the system, and the number and type of end users. With IT Infrastructure Complexity, they looked at both software (with such issues as the number of Client/Server applications and the number of distinct Operating Systems involved) and hardware (issues like the number of distinct hardware platforms and the frequency of required PCs replacement).
Thin clients decrease Management Complexity because they allow administrators to deploy a very centralized system. The model is identical to the original computer model that concentrated all of the computing power in the central mainframe, while terminals were distributed to give users access. As in the mainframe model, a thin client system also reduces the number of different "end users" by replacing individualized PCs with identical clients.
Software and hardware complexity is also decreased. A thin client lessens the need to run a software package in a client/server mode, as each client's session is actually running on the server itself. This allows all users to run the full software package, rather than breaking the functionality up into a client and a server part. When new software is installed, it is only installed on the server and all of the attached clients have access to the new application. Replacing hardware is much easier, as well. Clients are interchangeable, and there is no configuration required when one is replaced. Additionally, the frequency of replacement because a computer becomes obsolete is reduced because the end user sees the capabilities of the server, not the client.
In addition to complexity, The Gartner Group also added something that they called "Operational Risk", which they define as "the potential cost associated with an event". Every system must survive a number of unexpected events, and some of them (for instance, hackers and viruses) can be very damaging to the system's integrity. They identified several categories of Operational Risk, some of which we list and explore below.
Nowhere is lost computer time more costly then in a plant that depends on the computer to control its manufacturing process. When a line goes down, the cost can run into thousands of dollars per hour. While there are a number of ways that a PC can go down, there are very few things that can bring down a thin client. And, if it does go down, there is no time lost configuring a client to take its place.
It is very difficult to make a system composed of distributed PCs secure. Not only can users frequently break into the systems, they can also steal data or add viruses (via a floppy disk drive). Thin clients, on the other hand, have no disk drives, and are very difficult to use to gain access to the network. Theft is also not an issue. Because a thin client is useless without a properly configured server, operators will not be taking them for their personal use.
The Gartner Group defines Business Recovery as the "inability to resume fundamental business operations after the occurrence of extraordinary events, most often natural disasters". I was involved in a plant that was shut down by a flood. The water and mud destroyed a good bit of equipment and a great number of PCs. It was months before the plant resumed operation, and replacement of the control and monitoring PCs that they couldn't save was a major issue.
In this 1997 report, The Gartner Group reaches the conclusion that "it costs about $10,000 per user per year to own and operate a personal productivity PC." And as this study focused on standard commercial applications, it is easy to see that the cost of operating a PC in a factory is even higher. For any company looking to cut operating costs, the long term cost savings provided by thin clients cannot be ignored.
For more information on ACP Industrial Thin Client computers, please visit our web site at http://www.thinmanager.com
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