Although the jury is still out on the corporate prospects for the much ballyhooed network computer -- the low-cost client devices that depend on a server to execute and store applications -- many early adopters in IS are enthusiastic about the potential cost savings these devices have come to represent.

Mike Owdij, a technology consultant for AT&T, doesn't mince words in explaining why the telecommunications giant eschewed a fleet of PCs to outfit its nationwide offices and call centers with 11,000 NCs.

"Sheer economics," said Owdij, who worked with AT&T on purchasing its NCs from Boundless Technologies, in Austin, Texas. "The initial purchase price overall is close, within 10 percent, but when you look at total life cycle and the cost of ownership of NCs vs. PCs, there's no comparison."

In just one example, Owdij estimated that AT&T will reduce its average monthly maintenance costs per user seat from $60 for a PC to $10 for the NC. The NCs themselves cost $750 each, not including a monitor.

"We've reaffirmed that our decision was correct," Owdij added.

Among those IS managers who have taken the NC plunge, some common themes crop up: lower cost, ease of administration and maintenance, increased security, and the emergence of applications written in Sun's Java programming language.

"We think Java-enabled applications are very important to our future, and we won't consider an NC vendor who is not committed to it," said an IS consultant who asked not to be identified.

Other IS managers said their support of NCs stems from the realization that whole categories of employees simply do not require the heft of a full- function PC on their desks.

"It's wonderful to give your users something they can't screw up," said Kevin Smith, director of corporate technology services for ProStaff Personnel Services, a temporary staffing company based in Minneapolis, currently with 130 offices nationwide.

ProStaff is in the midst of building a nationwide network connecting 700 Wyse Technology WinTerm 2500T NCs over an AT&T frame-relay network to two data centers that house a variety of servers, including five WinFrame servers and two Digital Pentium Pro quad-processor, Windows NT-based Prioris servers.

Prior to this implementation, ProStaff had a smattering of offices with PCs connected on Novell-based LANs, while other locations simply had stand-alone PCs running locally stored applications. Now, Prioris servers store and execute the company's productivity applications, including Microsoft Exchange, as well as its Windows-based staffing applications. Users connect to the network via WinFrame servers and access the applications with the assistance of Citrix's WinFrame Windows emulation software.

Smith estimates it will cost him less to support 700 networked WinTerms per year than to maintain the company's home office LAN of 100 Compaq 5120 Pentium desktops.

Most users said they encountered few glitches in deploying NCs across their companies.

However, they cautioned other IS administrators who are considering a thin- client conversion not to attempt cost savings on the server side.

"I've heard naysayers talk about the bottlenecks of having 500 NC users trying to log in at the same time, and it's true -- if you're going to put everybody on a single processor server, it ain't gonna work," said Donovan L. Resh, senior vice president and CIO of Retired Persons' Services, an Alexandria, Va.-based prescription-fulfillment company serving members of the American Association of Retired Persons.

Resh is planning to deploy 1,000 @workStations from HDS Network Systems to perform three distinct functions across the company. Some of the devices will replace dumb terminals in a series of telecenters; some will be used as data-entry machines running a highly automated mail-order system; and the rest will serve as productivity clients running Microsoft Office applications.

Resh has limited himself to linking 50 NCs per server. Each server is an ALR Pentium Pro 200-MHz quad-processor machine.

After testing in-house applications and setting up Citrix's WinFrame network software solution for NT, Resh said the company is ready to roll.

Resh estimates the total cost of each client seat, including monitor price and software licensing fees, to ring in at $1,500.

At Boston College (BC), in Newton, Mass., the IS department is evaluating NCs for several different functions on campus, including deploying them within departments that don't normally use PCs, such as buildings and grounds and dining services.

The goal, BC officials said, is to provide access to campus information, the Internet, and e-mail.

"Essentially, we want every employee at BC to have basic computing access, much like they all have a phone," said Paul Dupuis, director of technology, planning, and integration at the 10,000-student college.

BC has been evaluating devices from IDEA Associates, in Burlington, Mass., and intends to launch a pilot NC project that will give students and employees access to the devices beginning in January.

Dupuis said he strongly supports the Oracle reference profile for NCs because of its simplicity and the fact that access to Windows applications is not a requirement.

"Too many people are treating NCs wrong, trying to turn them into cheap PCs," Dupuis said, adding that his ideal NC, used primarily for e-mail and Internet access, would be priced at about $300.

Ray Bacon, regional systems administrator for Mr. Gatti's Pizza, in Austin, is planning a companywide rollout of Boundless NCs during the first quarter of 1997.

The NCs will be designated to run point-of-sale applications in each of the 300 restaurants in the southern United States. Bacon will be setting up local-area networks of about 10 NCs and one NT server in each location.

Later next year, Bacon plans to establish a wide-area network linking all of the restaurants. The company is also converting its two corporate offices, now PC-based on Novell LANs, to Boundless NCs.

Meanwhile, AT&T plans to spread its NC wings beyond the single-function confines of its call centers.

According to AT&T's Owdij, the company will be running sales, billing, and account applications on its Boundless NCs, as well as setting up a subset of users who will execute Microsoft Office.

"We're real happy with the reliability and availability," Owdij said. "I know it sounds corny, but I can't think of any problems we've had."

But uncertainty about NCs remains, partly fueled by the fact that the devices' most high-profile proponents -- Sun, IBM, and Oracle -- are in the infancy stages of their thin-client evolution.

IBM just launched its Network Station NC but is not shipping it yet. Oracle continues to evangelize the NC concept while still busily rallying hardware vendors such as Acorn Computer Group around its reference profile. Sun, which introduced its JavaStation in October, has captured several large accounts, including FTD, First Union, Federal Express, and British Telecommunications.

However, a small bastion of traditional terminal vendors and start-up companies that embraced the NC concept early on has been serving a growing segment of early corporate adopters, such as AT&T. These vendors include Boundless as well as Network Computing Devices, Wyse, and HDS. Each has been shipping NCs in volume for the last few months.

These vendors' progress seems to bear out, in part, a study released last week by Zona Research that identifies the primary commercial opportunity for NCs as in the terminal replacement market.

The Zona report cites "application, sociological, and general comfort issues" as factors preventing NCs from making much headway as PC stand-ins.

Yet the study sees a wealth of opportunity for NCs -- particularly in the context of the Internet -- in the consumer and education markets.

Zona concludes that NC proponents' focus on total cost of ownership will succeed in pushing Intel and Microsoft to address PC manageability issues, a theory that also appears to be coming to fruition in the form of Wintel's proposed NetPC and the proliferation of management software solutions such as Intel's LANDesk Client Manager.

Source: InfoWorld