Five of the most influential vendors in the PC industry are preparing to announce on March 19 a set of technologies and initiatives designed to lower the cost of building, buying, and owning PCs and rally the industry against the encroaching network computer platform.

The five - Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Microsoft are teaming up to announce the final specification for the NetPC, the stripped-down PC designed by Microsoft and Intel. The spec will include ease-of-use and cost-efficient technologies for building low-cost PCs. In separate announcements in the weeks following the release of the spec, these and other vendors hope to unveil additional management technologies, asset-management programs, and technical-support services to help control the total cost of PC ownership for IT managers.

In their announcement at the CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany, the five companies will offer a road map of products and services to be introduced throughout the year. Sources from all five vendors say they expect most PC manufacturers to support the initiative.

The five vendors will announce that they will deliver later this year low-cost, low-administration NetPCs built around Intel's NLX motherboard and Microsoft's Zero Administration Windows. Beginning next month, the vendors will offer users additional services for lowering desktop-computing costs. In March HP will provide expanded remote-management features based on its OpenView; Dell will unveil in the second quarter a comprehensive PC lifecycle services program; and at the beginning of April, Compaq will unveil PCs that incorporate many of the low-cost technologies that will be found in NetPCs.

The CeBIT announcement serves as the kickoff for a campaign by the Wintel forces to prove that PCs are a cost-effective alternative to NCs.

Parts of the five-vendor initiative already are falling into place. HP last week announced it is adding desktop and systems management products to its OpenView enterprise management framework, expanding its value to the desktop community. In March HP will announce more total-cost-of-ownership features that tie its commercial desktop line more closely to OpenView.

With Dell's PC life-cycle management services, which will be expanded in the second quarter, IS managers will be able to save money by offloading all aspects of acquisition, management, upgrading, and disposal of PCs.

Ultimately, this initiative is not limited to NetPCs. Many PCs from some of the major vendors, including Compaq, Dell, and HP, will be built around Intel's NLX PC chassis, which will let users replace PC motherboards, memory, power supplies and other components without replacing the whole PC. Vendors will use the same motherboard to build PCs, NetPCs, and notebooks.

By the summer, Intel also is expected to begin shipping standard boards based on the new Pentium MMX and Pentium II chips to simplify PC engineering, reducing system-design costs and greatly increasing the reliability of the new PCs, NetPCs, and notebooks.

Jim Allchin, Microsoft's senior VP of desktop and business systems, maintains that the NetPC and expanded Zero Admin features can benefit users. "Customers tell us they don't want to lose the flexibility they have in the PC today," he says, "but how about making the system so it's easier to roam for users, so that when things break they can get fixed faster?"

Zero Admin Windows will store a user's entire PC configuration on a network server, letting users "roam" from PC to PC on the corporate network. Whichever system the user logs on to will become that user's PC, with access to all of his or her files, programs, and network privileges.

Mike Winkler, senior VP and group general manager at Compaq, says the network-centric concept behind NCs is losing its luster. "Our primary focus on the low-cost PC alternative is the NetPC," says Winkler. "The feedback we're getting from customers is the initial hype for Java and NCs has cooled off."

Systems built using the NetPC guidelines also will include an Intel chipset that contains a Desktop Management Interface agent for tracking information on the machine, such as its configuration and serial number. An administrator will be able to collect and examine that information in a database on a network server and use it to perform management functions.

All this technology convergence is occurring as the first NCs have begun shipping. That, in turn, is putting pressure on PC companies to respond to IT managers' increasing questions about how to lower total cost of ownership, increase manageability of systems, and make PCs easier to use.

"We're past the stage where people haven't heard of cost of ownership and asset management. Now vendors are seeing that more as a user requirement," says Chris Germann, research director at Gartner Group Inc., an IT advisory firm in Stamford, Conn.

Source: Information Week