Kevin Smith does not sound like a man in the throes of deploying a nationwide computer network. Instead, Kevin Smith sounds happy.

"If you were in my chair, you'd be enthusiastic, too," he says.

Smith, director of corporate technology services at Pro Staff Inc., a temporary-services company in Minneapolis, is an early adopter of thin-client network computers. Pro Staff is installing some 700 of Wyse Technology Inc.'s Winterm NCs at 140 offices across the country.

The NCs will let Pro Staff employees access the company's customer-management application and other Windows-based apps, all housed on servers running Citrix Systems Inc.'s WinFrame software at the company's data centers. "We could never have done this if we tried to do it with PCs," says Smith. "This is probably the most important technology that's happened recently."

While industry kingpins fight for position in the NC market, the present has arrived in a hurry. "We're booming," says Oscar Smith, president of Unique Cooperative Solutions Inc., a Kansas City, Mo., integrator that's installing thin-client systems for financial firms, health-care organizations, retailers, and others. This spring, Unique will handle its biggest deal, a 2,500-unit deployment for Sears, Roebuck and Co. The retailer will install NCs from Boundless Technologies Inc. in more than 1,000 Sears Auto Center, National Tire Warehouse, and TireAmerica stores.

Unlike many new-technology pioneers, this first generation of NC users is a far cry from the stereotypical beta maniacs. Early NC users tend to be a practical lot. They focus on cost, ease of use, ease of maintenance, and ability to handle existing vital applications and Windows software.

So far, they like what they see. "I've never had something work out of the box like this," says Chip Childress, IS director at Holsten Medical Group, a physician practice in Kingsport, Tenn., that's halfway through a rollout of 250 NCs at its 13 clinics. Holsten will install an NC in each examining room, doctor's office, and nurse's station to provide constant access to the group's core medical-records package. Childress says it's working so well, "you kind of pinch yourself because it seems like a dream."

Childress was sold on NCs largely because the hardware is less expensive than PCs. "We want to have five terminals per doctor, and PC prices at the time we were designing the system allowed us only 50 PCs for 50 doctors. That wasn't enough boxes," he explains. "The Winterms saved us enough up front to do what we wanted-even factoring in our server costs and software licensing."

Server costs are an important part of the NC equation, especially for large, highly centralized networks like the one Pro Staff's Smith is putting in place. Smith pays as much as $80,000 a pop for Digital Equipment servers. "We need our servers big and beefy," he says.

The payoff is the ease with which Pro Staff's IT team of 13 can service hundreds of widely dispersed users. All applications are controlled centrally in Minneapolis, as are all changes to applications. If a user in the field has a problem, Smith can provide real-time help by co-piloting an application from his own desk. Pro Staff is building extra reliability into its network by including some redundancy at each of its two data centers, and by giving a branch manager in each office a PC. Employees traveling to another office can always log on to their own personal screen, Smith adds, "because their desktop isn't on a desktop."

Ample Access

To date, Smith says, getting network access has not been a problem for his NC users, and bandwidth demands have been low. In fact, the only bottleneck came when Pro Staff was printing a large volume of checks. "But we got around that," says Roger Rohus, a technical specialist at Pro Staff's Dallas data-processing center. "We've had the phone line drop a couple of times for a few minutes, but we're up a whole lot more than a LAN would be."

Rohus was no cheerleader for NCs when the project was announced. "I was very, very negative when I saw the topology for what we were going to do," he recalls. Rohus thought that depending on a server in Minneapolis was far too risky. But now, he says, "We're running our whole operation that way, and I think it's the only way to have a WAN."

Pro Staff's system is also available to employees who don't use NCs, including salespeople with notebook computers and headquarters staff with desktop PCs. All users can communicate with the Citrix WinFrame software on the servers in Minneapolis.

Others say low maintenance costs on large networks are the major selling point for NCs. That's the take of Don Resh, senior VP and CIO of Retired Persons Services Inc. in Alexandria, Va., the pharmaceutical group of the American Association of Retired Persons, who runs one of the first big NC systems to be fully operational:1,000 units at three locations, with 200 more NCs on the way. "The minute you install an NC, you feel the difference in its support requirement as compared to a PC," says Resh. "There's nothing a user can do to screw them up."

Resh calculates big savings over the long term:"Using industry numbers, five years of support and maintenance for 1,000 PCs would cost $35 million. I think we can do it for $2.5 million with what we've got."

Saving money isn't the only attraction of NCs, users say. Joe Faltesek, a technical consultant with Lawson Software, another Minneapolis company making an early commitment to NCs, cites performance. Lawson ordered 300 IBM Network Stations to replace PCs in training rooms after the NCs proved their speed in demonstrations. "If people are excited about the hardware, they're going to remember our software," says Faltesek. "The Network Station is far faster than a PC with an emulator."

There is one hurdle that users must clear when migrating to the NC environment: giving up the control that puts the "personal" in personal computer. "It's a cultural issue," says Smith of Pro Staff. "If you have a killer app that you really need, we'll put it on the server so you can access it."

Forget about moving your favorite game to the server, though. "I'm a hard-ass about it," says Smith. "At work, you use the phone they give you to do the job. Why should a computer be different?"

Source: Information Week