India Client Virtualization - Initial period..(2000-2003)

The Thinclient in the Initial days was with Geode Processor with 8MB Flash and 16 MB of Memory.. the OS was basically of Embedded Linux and and WINCE and Embedded NT was yet to come in..These were the very initial days and the teams in India were just trying to learn the basics.. there are hardly any references available there for any issues and every thing had to be invented..

Many of the Government / Banking / Private customers were just started computerization or up gradating their older Green Terminals.. At this stage the for Thinclients the only solution available was based computing and the connectivity has to be only on LAN..

The issues related to Hardware were really serious - The Server Hardware really need to be very high.. and at that point of time even a 1GB Memory on a server is a luxury... the cost of of server was really high..

The connectivity of peripherals devices to the Thinclients and make them work with out any issues was really challenging.. there were different printers and configurations available.. (Serial / parallael etc..) then the customers wanted to connect few devices for scanning and other purposes.. basically through Serial..

Every time we meet up with the customers the following were the key questions asked;

1. What are all the applications need to run

2. What are all the peripherals need to be attached

3. Networking available or not (We are talking about LAN)

4. Any expertise on Server available or Not

and then whats the over all cost considering the Thinclient + Monitor + Server.. (The monitors were 14" CRT Monitors..)

To address this we come out with the different solutions like;

- Port mapping

- Port re-direction (Parallel / Serial)

- Drive mapping / Management etc.

Operating system was another challange - The new Server was Operating system based on Windows was a total new concept in India (Windows NT) and the terminal services on NT was altogether a new concept..

customers are not used to pay license fee just for a service (Terminal Services) and Terminal services by default doesnt support all functionalities discussed on the above.. hence more challange.. The other option available (easy option i would say) is to go with Citrix but then the cost of license was much higher than that of the Thinclient Hardware itself..

so with all these Technical challenges the vendors have launched Thinclients in India (VXL and followed by HCL)..

Client Virtualization - Stage 1

In India Client virtualization is there for more than more than 25 years.. !!! starting from the Unix - Green Terminal days.. Mainly adapted by government agencies thanks to the innovations and support from National Informatics Center (Famously known as NIC)..

This started changing towards end of 90's.. By end of 90's Desktops with local Windows OS seems to be a better option considering the costing and there were no real alternatives available at that point of time for the Green Terminals other than PC's...


In the early days VXL was pioneer in offering Thinclient solutions.. HC vL was there in Green Terminal business and then was yet to make inroads in to the Thiclient business..

In the above scenario for VXL moving in to Thinclients was an obvious move (Globally WYSE and Compaq was in the same stage at that time)..because by end of Year 2000 only very few customers were buying the Terminals and Hardware Terminal Servers .. (80% by India Railways) and some to MTNL and few other customers..

In India HCL was bit late in entering in to the Thinclient business but thanks to the support and push from Late Mr. Raman (One of the Founding members of HCL)..HCL also slowly made entry in to Thinclient business by the year 1999-2000..

By beginning of 2001 two vendors were there offering Thinclient solutions in India.. and then the challenges ahead were huge..

To start with the cost of the desktops are coming low.. Intel has come out low cost chips.. every user is offered with a PC with all peripherals (Printers / Scanners).. PC was becoming really personal.. !!!

Lets look at the challenges one by one and how each were addressed slowly.. over a period of time.. in the coming posts.. (These were the interesting days and we will lot of innovations .. :-) :-))

Client Virtualization

I am fortunate to be part of the client virtualization history happening in India and few places i was part of it.. in this blog i am going to describe the details of how the Industry evolved starting from the Year 2000.

This can be categorized in to three periods.. Initial - Stage - Where the product and solutions are totally new and the Hardware and software was still under development..

Then comes the boom period mainly fueled by the BFSI and then comes the advanced era - where government agencies adapting to Thinclient in a big way...

After explaining every stage -- we can look and jointly analyze where the market will move in the next 10 years..

With this i will welcome all to an wonderful "Virtual Journey"

Hi

Long time i thought of sharing my understanding and sharing with all about the emerging desktop solutions and get in familiar with the new ones available.. may this can be the platform for the same...

Will start posting my thoughts on the same..