Desktop computing is where the rubber hits the road, as far as information technology is concerned. The 30 centimetres between screen and eyeball dictates whether your expensive servers, networking kit, application licences and contracts will deliver the required performance.

For many individuals, personal computing is synonymous with desktop
computing, as PC clients, workstations or their thin-client equivalents deliver a standardised set of applications to a familiar user base.

Whether running SAP or a Microsoft Office front end, a computer is ­ in short ­ a computer. But there have been a number of advances in related areas, notably in terms of mobile devices and the web ­ and it is a reasonably safe bet that your organisation will make use of some combination of these technologies.

Desktop computers have never been the most reliable of beasts ­ we may only now see the blue screen of death on occasion, but we all recognise that it still lurks somewhere under the surface.

Mobile devices, such as PDAs, BlackBerrys and other handheld delights, might end up with the same internal combination of processing and memory as a desktop computer, but their provenance has resulted in some quite specific functions and uses.

Freeform Dynamics research suggests IT leaders believe the most relevant device for remote users is the mobile phone, followed by the laptop. The prominence of the laptop reveals that personal computers often provide the right combination of application functions in the most appropriate form factor.

Handheld devices continue to grow in power and their operating systems are following suit, with the result that a middle category of devices is emerging. Such devices are small enough to be considered portable, but just large enough to work with, as opposed to communicate with.

Ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs), such as the OQO Model e2 and the Samsung Q1, provide personal computing facilities.

Such devices, however, should not be seen as laptop replacements, but as a second device to be used when a laptop is unavailable. Ultra-large PDAs, such as the HTC Advantage, aim to fill a similar gap.

Other crucial developments are taking place on the web. Our research and anecdotal evidence suggests collaborative, internet-based tools are gradually being accepted into the mainstream.

The second strand of internet-based activity surrounds software as a service (SaaS), a model that encompasses just about every form of web-based application and that appears to be more hype than substance.

All but a few providers have succeeded in emulating Salesforce.com’s success. From the corporate standpoint, we see SaaS initiatives wallowing at the bottom of the heap of priorities ­ right down, in fact, with social networking and Web 2.0.

But there is every reason to believe that web-based applications will eventually be used in some combination with more traditional, desktop-based applications. And here, Microsoft does seem to have the right strategy, especially when the firm talks about “software plus services”.

However ­ and this is a big however ­ no technology leader is in any hurry to throw away the traditional desktop model in favour of a pure internet-based application suite.

Rather than just being constrained by technical factors, IT directors will need to maintain control ­ and whatever the state of existing systems and desktops, transferring control to the internet cloud seems too great a risk.

And we, therefore, doubt whether there will be any major transitions in desktop configurations any time soon ­ we believe changes will be incremental, rather than revolutionary.

Companies such as Citrix and Microsoft’s Softricity acquisition illustrate changes in terms of application streaming to the desktop. Such developments will allow users to download enterprise applications on demand.

The impact on software licensing costs could be huge and present a significant challenge to IT suppliers that are attempting to efficiently deliver applications, while preserving revenues. Not all vendors will succeed.

User interfaces present another area for potential change; should users consider voice recognition and immersive graphical environments such as Second Life? Once again, the answer lies in evolution, not revolution. While progress is slow, a number of companies, such as IBM, Cisco and BT, are investing in Second Life.

Any organisation that is about to decide on its IT strategy needs to consider potential business outcomes, rather than available technologies.

No article about the future of the desktop would be complete without a discussion of open source. While Linux can provide a viable desktop operating system, open source has so far failed to penetrate the corporate psyche in all but a couple of high-profile, public sector organisations.

A combination of a lack of interest from hardware manufacturers and poor support of mainstream applications has kept Linux in the domain of the hobbyist.

At the same time, Microsoft has not been idle. Developments such as Windows Mobile 6 highlight how the company has learned the lessons of trying to replicate a standard operating system suitable for handheld devices.

Microsoft’s advantage, which it has thus far failed to fully exploit, is the possible joined-up nature of its applications. However, full integration between Windows Mobile, Sharepoint, Exchange and Office has yet to reach the mainstream.

Other developments, particularly Google Apps, the Apple iPhone, mashups and cloud computing, could create significant changes in personal computing habits.

But from a strategy perspective, most individuals will continue to use corporate desktop facilities for the foreseeable future.

Jon Collins is service director at analyst Freeform Dynamics

Let's be clear about one thing, if the developing world wants to emulate the western world's way of life, we will need multiple planets to supply the raw materials and absorb the waste. EMC's Dick Sullivan points out that China has nine motor vehicles per thousand heads of population, India has eleven and the USA has 1148.

Huge changes need to take place and many of them are quite beyond the scope of the IT department. But, having said that, ICT generally can make a substantial difference and have a positive effect, not only on the planet, but on society and on company profitability.

In the last item in this series, we saw how changes in the data centre and at the desktop could make a substantial difference to energy consumption, space usage and the bottom line. Today we'll look at how ICT can support the organisation in its pursuit of environmental objectives.

Broadly speaking, ICT can help run a more efficient and less energy-consuming organisation. It can also help 'dematerialise' a company's products and the means by which it delivers its services. To take a simple example of dematerialisation, remember when we had telephone answering machines? Now the same function is delivered as a service, either by the telecom service provider or by software inside the organisation. More recent examples are online music and eBooks.

Another form of dematerialisation is to substitute travel with videoconferencing. We can transport people as bits instead of atoms. And save the economic and environmental costs of ground and air transport as well as accommodation expenses. EMC uses Cisco's TelePresence system and finds meetings very realistic. The worst aspect is that you can't all go down the pub together when the session's over.

Forrester Research suggests that, in future, the cost of a product or service will be measured not only in price, but also in terms of energy consumed over its lifecycle. No doubt a product's inherent recyclability and use of hazardous chemicals could also be taken into account. Such information would need to be recorded and maintained by IT systems. And it will apply to both the purchase, processing and supply activities of a company. All companies will need to account for their environmental performance.

IT can't act alone and its impact will vary in proportion to the type of organisation it is supporting. It must be difficult if you're the CIO of a coal-burning power station to know that 60 percent of the energy produced goes straight up the chimney. But we all have to do our bit and hope that others, with bigger carbon deficits are doing something about theirs.

The important thing is to look at the business as a whole, along with the CEO, facilities, HR and anyone else with a vested interest. Raw materials, manufacturing, logistics, staff travel and buildings are all part of the mix. IT applied intelligently can reduce road and air miles, reduce commutes and eliminate many business trips altogether. In America, UPS plans its routes to maximise the number of right turns. It estimates that this, and its package flow technology, saved it three million gallons of fuel last year.

Cutting the carbon footprint is a question of motivation at the top. Once a company has decided to act, every aspect of the business can be re-examined in this light. The trick, certainly in the early days, is to look for the big wins. These usually deliver nett economic, environmental and social benefits.

An IP communications network can put antennae in every part of a business. Instead of separate monitoring and control systems, they could be consolidated into a single all-embracing network, in theory at least. Building security, cctv, presence sensors, lighting, elevator control, air conditioning, fire alarms, remote sensing of reservoir water levels, railway points and so on could be integrated and automated. But common sense needs to be applied with regard to the investment needed and the payoff expected.

It's unlikely that anyone in the organisation will be familiar with all the potential opportunities. So why not create online meeting places where employees can discuss and share information and opinion? Especially in identifying opportunities for the beneficial application of ICT. The more ICT is seen as value-adding, the more it will attract budget and raise its importance to the organisation.

In order to keep the planet ticking over and to recover lost ground, we need to shift as many of our desires as possible away from material things and towards services. It all sounds terribly idealistic, but when you think that an iPod is probably thousands of times more environmentally friendly over its life than a conventional music system with its collection of records, CDs and tapes, then it's not such a big leap. We still get the pleasure we crave but with a much smaller environmental impact. The short term hit of retiring the old equipment and buying the new ought to lead to a long term nett benefit.

IT can help at many levels. Not least in environmental accounting for all the companies inputs, processing and outputs, in the effective operation of the buildings and services and in the minimisation of travel, accommodation and commuting.

But, it has to be said, if your company does not take any of this stuff seriously then your best bet is to show how environmental actions can actually benefit the bottom line. And take it from there.

Say "green" to most enterprise IT suppliers and they fire back with "energy". They see energy issues as the number one threat for organisations, and IT departments in particular. They also see it as their number one opportunity to hook their sales teams into your refresh cycle. The twin evils of faltering energy supplies and rising prices deliver hardware and software suppliers a chance to offer IT departments what amounts to an energy-related 'get out of jail free' card.

Dig a little deeper and each supplier will lay claim to a green agenda. As we saw in the last report in this series, some have a genuine history of environmental concern and try to be ahead of the regulators while others simply do what they are obliged to. It might help your company's own environmental credentials if you ensure that your own suppliers are credible in this respect.

Most vendors agree that IT equipment usually runs inefficiently. Servers and desktops alike only run to a fraction of their capacity yet, whether fully occupied or idle, they still gobble power. The cost of power is rising and demand for computing resources shows no sign of abating. Making IT equipment and its surrounding infrastructure more energy efficient saves money and improves your company's environmental performance.

The first step is for IT departments to figure out how much energy they use. Traditionally, this is not something they have had to worry about. Electricity is bought and paid for by facilities and accounts and a proportionate charge slapped on IT by the bean counters. Unless, or until, IT can measure its power requirements and identify exactly where the energy goes, it cannot put an effective energy saving strategy into operation.

For many organisations, this need to manage energy usage comes at the same time that the company is growing, placing increased processing demands on the IT department. These contradictory forces will be shaping the IT agenda very soon, if they are not already. One good thing is that computer power continues to grow while occupying the same amount of rack space.

If you're running a data centre, a large chunk of incoming energy goes on cooling. The next large slice is taken by the IT equipment itself. The next chunk is used by the UPS. If you are running racks of x86-based servers, the news is good because these are currently the least efficiently used pieces of equipment. And they throw out a lot of heat, which is usually wasted to the atmosphere although some companies try to put it to good use, feeding it into the space heating system, for example.

A more efficiently run server farm with a more intelligent use of cooling equipment could pay cost and environmental dividends, either by shrinking energy budgets or by enabling growth. You'll find better designed racks and cooling systems on offer. Some, such as Hewlett Packard's Dynamic Smart Cooling  can be retrofitted to existing installations.

Moving to the servers themselves, let's be generous and say that the average server is running at 20 percent capacity (estimates start at five percent). Obviously, you won't crank that up to 100 percent but, through virtualisation, 60 percent might be achievable. That's a tripling of capacity or a shrinking of the equipment and its surrounding infrastructure by two thirds.

What about consolidation? If your computer operations are spread across multiple locations, could they be brought together? To take an extreme example, IBM consolidated 150 data centres to ten and 31 networks to one. It also went from 3900 servers down to 33 mainframes running Linux. The savings were astronomical and are ongoing. Sun went through a similar exercise, slashing its data centre floor area by 80 percent and its energy usage by 65 percent. The IT folk checked out the function of every server and powered down hundreds whose function couldn't be determined.

Sun estimates that the average desktop is run at around one percent of capacity. It advocates a thin client approach using its 4 watt SunRay devices. But, regardless of whether its figure for PCs is accurate, it does raise the issue of the appropriateness of equipment. Do people need the PC power that they're given? Do they know that standby mode consumes less energy than a screen saver? Do they switch off their machines at night? In the data centre, are the servers, storage and cooling over-specified for the job at hand? Would it matter if lower-power processors or slower drives were used?

Whichever way you look, the question "is this resource appropriate for the task?" can be asked. It's not a case of fork-lifting in a new data centre, although some vendors would love that, it's about systematically considering each component in a green/energy light in advance of your next equipment refresh.

And, when the time comes to refresh, don't forget to plan for the environmentally friendly disposal of old equipment and the packaging of the new equipment. An increasing number of manufacturers will be happy to make this part of the deal.

Throughout much of the last 15 years a lot of attention has been lavished on the less than humble personal computer, now almost universally revered as "the PC". While there is absolutely no doubt that the PC has enabled much productive, and valuable, work to be delivered it has not been without cost, especially in terms of the time spent configuring, repairing and maintaining such devices. However, in recent years the high cost of looking after the device has caught up with the PC.

A question many organisations are now asking, perhaps belatedly, concerns identifying the best way to deliver "desktop" service to users, and there are now many ways of answering the question. In addition to the standard 'unmanaged', usually Microsoft Windows-based PC, we have now entered an age where alternative solutions may be suitable for some users. Indeed, technology and business needs now ensure that alternative solutions are investigated.

The alternatives include using sophisticated management tools to assist daily PC administration and operations as well as potentially deploying rapidly maturing thin client-type solutions. In the not too distant future it is clear that newer offerings such as SaaS (software as a service) could have some role to play supplying basic desktop office functionality, but it is not there yet. It is also apparent that there will soon be obvious opportunities to bring well established virtualisation solutions to the desktop. The simplicity of deploying a single file containing a user’s desktop to whatever PC device is needed quickly and without fuss is certain to attract attention, especially in those organisations that are already comfortable operating virtual machines on their server platforms.

On the question of better management of desktop / laptop machines, this is something that Microsoft has emphasised as one of the major benefits of Windows Vista. With this in mind, it is informative to note the results of some research (yet to be published) that we have recently undertaken concerning the likely adoption of Vista among enterprises. In answer to the question “When do you think you are likely to roll out Windows Vista in your organisation?”, fewer than one in 10 of those that take an ad hoc or informal approach to monitoring the quality of service delivered by IT say they will roll out Vista within a year, versus greater than 40 per cent of those at the other extreme who monitor performance across the broad scope of IT service delivery.

This is, perhaps, indicative, that the challenges associated with desktop service delivery are now much more visible than in the past and that there is a growing recognition of the business value delivered by IT in general and the desktop in particular.

I will be writing more on the rapidly expanding range of methods becoming available to help organisations large and small deliver desktop services. In future articles I will consider the current state of affairs, the benefits, challenges and general fit of various approaches to desktop deployment.

Tony Lock

I recently joined a group of IT managers to dig into the issues they face in building their next-generation desktop architectures.

The format of the event was a roundtable discussion on key issues, sponsored by NEC and hosted by Computing. But once we started going round the table doing the introductions, it seemed that everyone was keen to unburden themselves of the pressing issues and trends that they see today, and it’s interesting to see how this small sample mirrors some of the output of Freeform Dynamics’ primary research.

One of the areas that we naturally covered was the migration to Microsoft Vista and the Office 2007 application suite. Opinions in the room matched the research that we carried out on Vista adoption in the first part of 2006, with only one out of the 10 IT managers present doing an active migration, the others preferring to wait some period of time until convinced of the stability of the new products. This latter course was expressed in a number of different ways, from the standard ‘not until Service Pack 2’ statement to a more measured response tied to the product lifecycle of the PCs.

One of the frustrations expressed was the feeling that everyone was being driven by Microsoft’s product release agenda, rather than being involved in a consultative process to take business capability forward on the new platforms. While we all like to be armchair marketing experts, there is an argument that says that Microsoft has been very keen on pushing the new technologies in Vista and Office 2007 and the degree of development effort involved in delivering them, encapsulated in the mass advertising around the campaign ‘The Wow starts now’, as opposed to communicating the undoubted business benefits that can be derived from adopting them. This is particularly true of new line of business applications developed using the latest version of Visual Studio that can access the new display capabilities in Vista, and the integration of products in the Office suite with collaboration services such as SharePoint.

SharePoint has achieved a viral level of success within organisations, much in the way that departmental Lans (local area networks) did in the 1980s, and this was again validated by a straw poll in the room, with some of the participants noting their surprise at how many SharePoint servers they were able to find on their networks when they went and looked. In a lot of cases these servers remained in place after the project they were set up to support had finished, which raises some interesting issues around management and administration.

Clearly SharePoint is delivering business value, but in many cases there is no corporate policy for management and use, so it’s probably a sound idea for IT and business to get together to develop a support and management model for better managed use of the technology. This would then make it easier to develop some of the Office 2007 collaboration features that would otherwise be underutilised. This additional value would also help motivate users to go through the pain barrier as far as learning the use of the new look-and-feel of the suite, such as the ribbon menu system.

Another area that a number of participants commented on was the pressure on IT coming from newer entrants to the workforce who have been accustomed to a rich online experience. It’s often frustrating for these younger people to move into to a computing environment that is missing the kind of collaborative experience that they have been used to. In many cases they understand the difference between work and social life, but they don’t understand why technologies such as online group chat, file sharing and free voice over IP are not available to facilitate their work.

This feeling is further strengthened when the employer claims a commitment to home working, in which case the remote worker is using a home machine on which they are used to using newer social tools. This contrasts with the challenge at the other end of the age and experience spectrum with more mature workers who lack IT confidence, feeling very nervous about setting up and doing self-maintenance on home networking.

There was also some discussion on the whole area of green computing. Much in the news with politicians tripping over themselves to burnish their ecological credentials, IT managers are dealing with more practical issues, like how to get all the heat out of dealing rooms that have three computers and five screens per desk, and getting power in and out of wiring closets that have to be upgraded to support the power over Ethernet (PoE) required to drive the latest generation of IP phones. Having worked for a thin client manufacturer in a former life, it was good to hear that this technology still has good mindshare in the enterprise, with many IT managers considering it for suitable environments such as call centres, hotdesks, and applications where data has to be kept away from local storage. Many of the drawbacks are now overcome, particularly in areas of graphics delivery, with newer techniques such as those from NEC allowing the delivery of streaming video without being hamstrung by the poor performance of the screen display protocol.

The main conclusion, which isn’t exactly a revelation, is that IT managers are clearly ready to embrace newer technologies, but on their own terms. Key criteria include achieving harmony with existing investments in software and systems, as well as timing of the product upgrade cycle. Vista and Office upgrades will be more palatable if they fit this model, as opposed to being force-fed as the only available software option on newer equipment. But the substantial discontinuity that this migration represents is giving some IT managers, particularly those in the public sector with an obligation to get the most utility from the public money they use, to look, however briefly, at alternative desktop technologies such as thin client, and even different software solutions such as Linux, OpenOffice and StarOffice.

David Perry