Forget Linux. Forget Windows 2000. Look over there. See it? There’s the spot where the thin-client people are preparing their takeover of our AS/400 networks. If you haven’t picked up on this trend yet, there’s a thin-wind blowing through the computer industry and big money players everywhere are looking for a piece of the action.
IBM has been a player for a while now. With its IBM Network Station product line, IBM is positioning itself as a major player in the overall thin-client marketplace. IBM would also like to become the dominant player in the AS/400 thin-client network marketplace and it certainly seems to have the strategy to do that. (See “The Dumb- Terminal-to-IBM Network Station Replacement Roadmap” by Ed Krath in the September/October 1999 issue of AS/400 Network Expert for more details.) In September, IBM announced two new network computers for the Network Station product line, the Network Station 2200 and the 2800, which use Intel-compatible and Intel processors instead of IBM’s PowerPC procesors. So, as a player, IBM continues to multiply its offerings in an attempt to capture the market.
But IBM isn’t alone here. Also in September, Sun Microsystems purchased German office productivity vendor Star Division Corporation, makers of the StarOffice office automation package. StarOffice competes with Microsoft Office 2000, but StarOffice has the advantage of being able to run on Windows, OS/2, UNIX, and Linux. The buzz, of course, is that Sun will enable StarOffice as a Java application and then leverage StarOffice by running it on its newly announced Sun Ray 1 enterprise appliances (nobody wants to call these things “network computers” anymore) that corporate customers can lease for $9.99 per month. So Sun is making some major noise now, too.
The other big rumor as I write this (it may be old news by the time you read it) is that Compaq will also enter the thin-client hardware marketplace with a number of desktop units that run either the Linux or Microsoft Windows CE operating systems. Add Compaq to the existing list of thin-clients hardware vendors that include Boundless Technologies, Neoware, NCD, and Wyse Technology, and the marketplace is starting to look a little crowded.
Who wants to control the applications? Microsoft got into the market early with its Windows NT Terminal Server Edition 4.0 (TSE) that adds terminal support to Windows NT. Coupled with Citrix’s Metaframe software, which allows network clients (such as IBM’s Network Station product line) to communicate with Windows TSE, you can run many of the popular PC-based software packages as services on Windows TSE, including IBM’s AS/400 Client Access Express for Windows, Microsoft Office 2000, Lotus SmartSuite, and Sun’s Star Division StarOffice.
With AS/400 access and office automation pretty much handled, the thin-client environment is now much more attractive for AS/400 shops, particularly those who are looking for replacements for dumb 5250 terminals. In addition, the benefit of centralizing application deployment on the server level, instead of the desktop, is attractive as many shops are looking to cut their support costs and avoid the disruptions of the past when user PCs crashed almost daily. The technology is now at the point where deployment is not only possible, but desirable. The big names, sensing the trend, are following the money.
The thin-client marketplace is maturing and it will heavily affect all of us in the next year or two. This trend will force us to make different decisions as to how we integrate our AS/400s with the rest of the world. Between thin-client computing and cross-platform strategies, your server platforms may once again become the focus of your computing power. While driving down support costs, issues such as high availability, huge storage capacity, infrastructure and bandwidth, networking, and failure recovery will become even more important than they already are. When the world becomes thin, it changes everything and we need to start thinking about how these new solutions will affect our organizations.
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