| Advantage TC
According to Manish Dave, Director, Mumbai-based Apurva Computers
Technologies, a system integrator and one of the few Indian companies to
manufacture thin clients indigenously, the reason why India has accepted thin
client computing now is due to the fact that it is a price sensitive market.
“With a desktop, one has to reinvest in it every four to five years for
maintenance and upgradation of the machine, whereas thin clients require single
point upgradation and maintenance,” he pointed out. It was during a trip to
Japan where Dave first saw a Linux-based thin client and realized the potential
it had in a country like India. Today Apurva Computers Technologies manufactures
over 50 thin clients and 120 thin client LAN cards called Smart Station at its
facility in Surendranagar.
The advantage of deploying thin clients is that they offer maximum security
and high return on investment (RoI). Users don't have to worry about data loss
because the data would be stored centrally and not locally. Cost of maintenance
would be cut down drastically since individual nodes would not have to be
maintained.
Keeping in mind the power condition in India, thin clients offer hope for
business that has to depend on power backup for hours on end. “A normal PC
consumes about 360 watts, whereas a monitor connected to a thin client consumes
only 23 watts,” chipped in Balaji. In short, for a business that wants highest
productivity/uptime and lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO) from its
equipments, thin clients would be an ideal option with its high RoI.
But the thin client is not without its failings, especially in its
perception. As mentioned earlier, the user could feel robbed of their privacy.
“But thin clients are a total productivity tool. However, they offer limited
high-end audio and video streaming capability due to which they are not suited
for business verticals like 3D graphics and animation,” added Peer.
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| Some of the first thin clients
available came with 1GB RAM. Today, thin clients are available with 1GB
flash memory |
Market size
Currently, most vendors in this segment acknowledge that the demand for thin
clients is not all that high; hence the volumes are very low. According to
Adhikari, “The current market size of thin clients is $10-11 million, which is
approximately 50,000 to 60,000 units across India. We are looking at a growth of
approximately 30 percent YoY.”
International research agencies and various market intelligence reports
suggest that the thin clients market opportunity is anything close to four to
five percent of the total PC market size.
“On this assumption, India market potential is anything between 3,00,000 to
3,50,000 units. But the real numbers are a bit lesser than this primarily
because disk cannibalizes some of the demandless PC nodes in this space. Our
assumption is that thin client market in India is anything between 2,00,000 to
2,50,000 units as on date. The growth rates are much higher in the PC market,”
suggested Peer.
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Scoring over PCs |
- No primary storage (hard-disks, CDROMs,
floppies) required on thin clients. Memory requirement is minimal
- All moving parts are eliminated giving
users more uptime and performance enhancement
- Can use an obsolete PC with latest
software using thin client network card
- All user, network, resource and
application management can be done on the central server. This not only
reduces unnecessary system
administration but also allows for better control over your organizations
computing environment and user and access policy implementation
- All applications like MS Office, Internet
and e-mail applications, Oracle, SQL, and engineering design and even ERP
systems like SAP/R3 can be run from the thin client
- Resources available on the network like
CDROMs, FDDs, HDDs, printers, etc can be shared among users
- As all the data is kept on the server,
only the server's hard disks need to be protected
- Zero downtime for clients since all the
data is available centrally
- UPS is required only on the server side.
Even in the case of a power failure no data corruption or data loss can
take place on the thin client node as all computing virtually happens on
the server
- Hardware and software need to be upgraded
only on the server side
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