Sunday, May 29, 2011

First Client Virtualization Adaption in Indian Government Segment..


From the beginning we have been trying to work out a solution to meet the Government Departments requirement.. The first major break came from Tamil Nadu State government.. In 2001 Tamil Nadu government was looking at adapting IT in a big way for District administration and wanted to set up a model District with the latest IT Hardware and solution..

Thiruvaroor was selected for this purpose and Mr. Uma Shankar then the District Collector was given in charge of adapting the latest technology for the solution.. (Later he was the ELCOT chairman for some time during 2006-2008).. Mr Uma shankar who was looking for solution which can be deployed much easier and can help manage from a central location and found the Thinclient concept very attractive. Every Taluk had 10 Thinclients connecting to one server and then the Data was transferred to the central server every day on dial up. Mr. Krishnamurthy (Sales) and Mr. Baradharajan (Technical) were the key members who designed the total solution..

This 100 nos deployment was a major mile stone and helped to understand the concept and the concerns related to Thinclient deployment in live environments.. This was also used as a key reference for Thinclient deployment in the Government vertical.. After this around 2002 Karnataka High Court adpated Thinclients for its operations.. (The solution was supported and driven by Justice. Baruka - Later after 8 years he played a key role in Thinclients adaption in All India District High Court Computerization project)..

Except these there was not much adaption and support for Thinclients in the Government business.. This has also to do with INTEL Launching their low cost Celeron Based PC's around this time..

After 2003- after LIC and PNB Thinclient adaption and momentum started in the BFSI segment..

Then around 2005-2006 an innovation happened locally which opened up the altogether a new market in India.. (IT & ITES..).. More details on the next post..

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Client Virtualization Stage 1 - Leap

In the initial stages of the Thin client market, the basic challenge which we faced were the cost of the total solution. The base Thinclients itself was costing little higher than that of a desktop..then we need to add the cost of the servers and the OS licenses etc. The Thinclients came with an entry level processor (National Geode) and little amount of Flash memory and memory to support.. This was a factor which was limiting the Thinclient growth..

At this point of time VXL along with VIA was quietly working on a big opportunity with an innovative solution.. The opportunity was really big and the solution was very innovative.. The solution designed by VXL for LIC to address their branch computerization requirements using Embedded Linux Thinclients..

The solution reduced the need for a Terminal server at every location and the using VIA processor instead of National Geode helped increase the local performance and reduce the cost.. Suddenly there we have one customer adapting 10k Thinclients in one go..

The Thinclient locally had a full fledged browser and local printer drivers embedded locally.. using this the users can access their forms and access the core insurance application and if any printing can be given locally..

The first year of 10k units orders went to VXL. The second year the order went to HCL.. this started the new era for Thinclients in the Indian market..This was not adapted further because of some practical challenges on the field.. so after that the Linux Embedded based solutions were not taken up much.. (Until another innovative solution came after 3 years..)..

In the same year HCL designed a solution based on Windows Embedded XP for the Punjab National Bank's core banking branches.. this solution can be termed as "Application specific Terminals".. and in the year 2003-04 PNB formally came out with an RFP for Thinclients..this is again a major mile stone on the Thinclients business..and after this Windows Embedded Thinclients became a mainstream..

The innovative solution helped to reduce the over all initial cost of the solution and also helped the customer to save on Electricity and management cost as well..

I am personally happy as i was part of the team which designed the solution at HCL (from R&D Mr. Ramaiah / Mr. Subbiah / Mr. R. Muthu Kumar) and leading from the field along with the Sales team (Mr. Avinash / Mr. Sarabjit Bhatia) and happy that the same solution has become a benchmark in the BFSI and being adapted by many other Banks like BOI, BOB, OBC, SBI etc.. now it is 8th year anniversary.. :-) :-)

Starting from the year 2003 - many banks have started adapting the Thinclient solution for their core banking branches.. The banks were using core banking solution from Infosys (Finacle), TCS and few other solutions were there..The volumes started growing as the banks were more and more migrating their branches to core banking and the Thinclient solution was more stable in the banking environment..

The next phase was more challenging as the volumes started butPublish Post become stagnant as it was limited only to BFSI and the requirements of the Federal Government projects and that of ITES (two segments which were buying more computers) could not be addressed because of the over cost of the solution.. then came the innovative solution and we can say that is the start of the third phase..will post this in my next post..