Desktop virtualisation: Yes, it's cheaper

These figures don't add up

Step 1: Getting the PC

Buy or build a PC, whichever, its still only around £300 per PC for most users PC's. (A few companies I've worked for have built their own PC's, where they can create a good spec desktop PC for less than £300).

Step 2: Buying the software needed.

Gartner quote 250 applications per PC. WTF! even programmers don't buy that many applications.

Step 3: Long term software maintenance.

"Gartner applied its updated methodology to a hypothetical organization with central IT and 2,500 desktops"

Ok 2500 PCs being maintained does cost money for support staff. But $5867 per PC with 2500 PC's WTF! (and per year!) ... that's $5867 * 2500 = $14667500 ... so $14.6M per year!

Lets assume a support engineer costs (on average) say $40k, then a company with even a small army of 25 support engineers would still only cost $1M! … Plus that's assuming 1 engineer per 100 PC's, which is much more generous than 200-400 quoted in the article as typical for a PC desktop. So say 200 PC's per engineer and pay them all double, its still only at most $1M however you look at it and very likely a lot less.

I don't see how they even come close to this figure of $5867 (and per year!)... Unless Gartner are making some very bad assessments such as assuming 250 applications across the entire company and then assuming everyone needs every application and so then ignorantly just multiplying by 2500 PC's which would be insane. But even then they would require them to have to re-buy all that every year to justify this insane figure?!

So either we are talking about outsourcing support for the PC's in which case the outsourcing support company is leaching a fortune out of the 2500 PC's per year or Gartner have messed up with their estimates.

So is this article really about the outsourcing costs? ... but then, let me guess, having a "virtualised desktop environment" is the silver bullet which will kill this mythical $14.6M per year money monster. Oh what a surprise, I didn't see that punchline coming. ;)

This whole article reads like a sales pitch for virtualization, using a straw man argument of $5867 per PC as the thing to then attack (i.e. $14.6M across 2500 PC's), when in reality it should be no where near that much for any intelligently managed company.

Perhaps a better outlet for this kind of story is websites without so many technically minded readers. ;) … try somewhere like www.gulliblemanagerswithmoneytoburn.com ... just a thought. :)

Gartner TCO

Divide anything gartner says by 5 to 10 espcially when it comes to TCO - those guys have been industry m/puppets for years.

Common sense and good advice on the other topics though - it is so much easier to manage these things centrally - however html 5 is really going to hurt running the browser remotely (as much as flash does now) with resultant unhappy users.

Typo...

" ...who just needs word processing, email and web" should read " ...who just needs email and web". In my experience the vast bulk of things that people do on a word processor can be just as effectively handled via email. The only real exception to this would be letters to clients/customers and these should really be handled in a decent CRM system. Also, as there are many perfectly good webmail solutions, there really is no need for much more than a browser for most users (NB: CRM systems usually operate through a browser).

What a load of B$ !!

Really!... I leav my laptop (and my wifes and the family PC) on most days every day for more than 8hours... and no way do I receive an electricity bill for 16k per year!..

Do the sniff test before you open your mouth next time.... now bare in mind the average FULLY managed virtual desktop is circa $40 per user per month (enterprise)... the credibility just goes down the pan....

And where do those "thin" clients run on? ;-)

Funny thing is that I'm a netadmin by heart (and work) and recently jumped a little heavier onto the Windows environment. Partly because I had to, but also because I wanted to; I think its refreshing to keep up and see how the "other end" has worked its stuff out. Some of it feels underwhelming (administering a 2k3 server from Win7 using Powershell for example) while some other parts look pretty slick to me (MMC and the ability to make your own consoles for example; which can also be used to administer remote servers).

First.. How convenient that this article surfaces right before MS is said to deliver their "Windows thin PC". Coincidence no doubt ;-)

This Thin PC thingie is a "trimmed down" Windows 7 environment meant to "re-purpose existing PC's as thin clients". However what this article and much others seem to be ignoring is the question as to "so where do the CPU cycles come from?".

By default you get a nice 2-connection Admin license for a default Windows 2k3 server. IOW; you can use up to 2 concurrent remote connections to the server at the same time. So first you'd need to either purchase a terminal service license or look into upgrading to 2k8 which comes with CAL's by default. However, it would appear that this only runs on 64bit, see this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/pricing.aspx

So now I not only need to upgrade my OS but my 32bit server hardware as well. Granted; that would be required anyway in order to address the question "where do the cycles come from?". But this is even ignoring the very important and often forgotten step of "research and preparation", also mentioned in the article. While it doesn't appear this way from an employee point of view; all that invested time in research should be added to the total costs as well.

Then we have the very important issue of Single Point of Failure. So what if my server suddenly goes haywire? Instead of having a few people who (for example) can't send e-mail and can't save their work on the server (but luckily we can sent out someone informing the lot that they should save their work locally after which it'll be allright during the next time they logon). No, instead we now have several people who suddenly lost their work and worse: who most likely won't be able to perform any production until that server is back up.

Having PC's around isn't merely a cost for a company, it can also be a very robust and solid fallback in case there's some bigger issues going wrong.

Those costs? Its what I'd call a form of insurance. Sure; you can save money when you cancel it; but when looking at it in the longer run....

@cloudgazer

I never had any trouble writing off kit which still had residual book value.

Accountants get twitchy about retaining stuff with no residual value because you can't use depreciation to offset taxable income. Do it right and you can run at a (paper) loss or low net income for years.

It's not tax evasion. Perfectly above-board and a good accountant will make things simple as long as you don't show up with all your paperwork in a shoebox (Mine setup everything in Quickbooks so that all I had to do was keep things straight and all he had to do was audit the output. End result was an accountancy bill under 200 quid/year)

Using thin clients is attractive for a number of reasons (lower hardware costs, harder for endusers to futz with, easier support) but I'll bet that the replacement cycles remain as-is, simply because of accounting structures which make best use of depreciation allowances provided by the Inland Revenue.

Mine's the one with the texts on double-entry book keeping in the back pocket.

Nice try, but history will repeat.

People have been saying the same things about Citrix/Terminal Services for years. However, their main points of cost savings and manageability are continually refuted by research that indicates a well managed PC fleet costs about the same to run.

As I've been saying to customers for years, if this is the only tool in your kitbag, it restricts you. You are far better off having this as one of the tools you have available rather than the only one you have.