Thin Client

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Like many state and local governments, this Wisconsin county is seeing difficult times. Its proposed budget for 2010, starting Jan. 1, would require cutting nearly 400 jobs in IT and other areas, reducing the county's overall workforce to 5,256 people. Tensions over the budget appear to be very high; one local TV station showed a film clip of a scuffle that occurred this week during a protest of the cuts.

John said that next week he will present to a budget committee a $16 million 2010 spending proposal for his department that includes a move to thin clients and a plan to outsource mainframe work.

Previous cuts across government agencies have made it difficult to fund the replacement of old PCs. The county is supposed to be on a five-year replacement cycle, but a lack of funding has left some users with PCs that are six or seven years old, said John.

To stick to the five-year replacement schedule, the county would have to replace 900 PCs a year at a cost of $1,000 per machine. But the best the county can afford now is 150 new PCs a year. "We have been neglecting our PC replacement program dramatically," John said. Moving to thin clients would save the county more than $400,000 over the course of five years, he estimated. "It's a significant issue for us," he noted.

The county has funded replacement PCs out of its operational budget, but it's planning to finance the thin client upgrade as part of a bond issue that will see a partial rebate under the federal stimulus legislation approved by Congress earlier this year.

The county had already laid the foundation for a move to thin clients through earlier decisions to adopt server virtualization technology. And Web-based application delivery via the software-as-service model is making the move even easier. Last year, the county started using human resources applications hosted by Ceridian Corp.

While there may be little difference in some cases between the direct cost of hosted and on-premises applications, John said that SaaS becomes more economical when the costs of other services associated with on-site systems, such as storage and disaster recovery, are weighed. Johns did note that in some cases he doesn't see the benefits of SaaS. For example, he said that large cloud-based e-mail providers have yet to convince him that they can offer the county an exit strategy for abandoning its current system, he said.

Milwaukee County's plan to adopt thin clients "is probably fairly far out in front," at least among county governments, said Tom Manielli an analyst at IDC, who added that he sees a lot of positives to it. "From a maintenance perspective, you no longer have to send a tech with a cart to a desktop to do fixes." And thanks to improvements in hardware and virtualization tools, end users "probably won't notice a big difference" between thin clients and PCs, he said.

Thin client usage remains low, but Gartner Inc. forecast earlier this year that thin client terminals and diskless/repurposed PCs will represent 10% of all professional client devices by 2014. And Ray Bjorklund, a vice president at consulting firm Federal Sources Inc. in McLean, Va., said he expects the federal government to increase its adoption of thin client and cloud technologies. "It's a trend that makes pretty good economic sense and even better operational sense," he added.

While thin clients can help cut costs, John and his IT department face a particularly difficult time ahead. The budget proposal will outsource mainframe work, but the county will still host the environment. The outsourcer will be required to give hiring priority to county workers affected by the move. The budget document indicates that some 13 staffed positions may be impacted by the change and that outsourcing the tasks could save $450,000.