Low capability devices are doomed to fail

Before joining NComputing, Stephen Dukker was the founder and CEO of
eMachines, a company he founded to make computers affordable. In its first year,
eMachines achieved $817 mn in revenues and quickly became the third largest
manufacturer of personal computers in North America. He was also the founder and
president of PC Brand, one of the first mail order PC manufacturers in the
industry. Dukker has spent his entire career in driving down the cost of
computing. He brings more than thirty years of experience in computer
manufacturing and retailing to NComputing. In an interview with Dataquest,
Dukker dwells on why low cost computing has failed and how the NComputing model
of shared PCs will succeed. Excerpts

Low cost computing has not really worked anywhere in the world including
India. Your comments?

Some players in the industry do talk about $200 PC now and are saying it
will come down to $100 when volumes increase. But this is not a problem of
volumes. Almost all initiatives for low cost computing have been fundamentally
about lower power and lower computing capability.

At the same time you see technology heads of leading companies continuously
talking to the ISV community, saying CPUs are getting so powerful, and thus
build fatter software to eat more of this which only makes the problem worse. It
guarantees that these low capability devices with 400 MHz CPU are doomed to
fail.

Similarly, thin clients failed to take off due to three factorscost,
technical complexity, and above all, poor user experience. The poor user
experience was largely due to the inefficient communication protocol that was
used to communicate between the CPU and client devices. Protocols did not take
into account growth of multimedia and they also suffered from many network
latency issues. They continue to remain a major bottleneck to the success of
thin clients.

How does NComputing want to change all of that?

Computing and its predecessor company worked to build a system that
understood multimedia as an important element of the service and created a new
virtualization infrastructure that addresses all these issues. Apart from the
software, we have a single device where one computer can support from as low as
11 to as high 100 other computers. There are two differnet versions: one is for
local connection where client devices are directly connected to the PCs. They
can be located upto 10 mts from the PC and in this case we can send uncompressed
video as well because it is a local connection. So its the lowest in cost
solutions since it does not need switches. This is perfect for class-rooms and
costs around Rs 4,000 and is ideal for eleven computers. The second is the Rs
6,000 version which can scale up to thirty computers. This could be the
beginning of the end of the barriers of client computing.

Can you provide details of your recent partnership with the Andhra Pradesh
government?

Computing has been selected to supply 5,000-school education computing
initiative in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The program is aimed at
providing computing access to 1.8 mn children throughout the state. Andhra
Pradesh will have contracts with leading education IT firms to build computer
labs in 5,000 schools totaling 50,000 computing seats over the coming few
months. This would be the single largest deployment of NComputings solution in
India. The decision to deploy NComputings low-cost and eco-friendly solution
establishes the Government of Andhra Pradesh as an innovator in educational
computing and provides a blueprint for other governments and institutions
considering similar projects.

The government of AP will save $20 mn in up-front and ongoing costs. The
government will also use 90% less electricity compared to a traditional all-PC
solution. At about $70 per seat, our solution is the ideal platform to enable
schools, businesses, and governments to maximize their PC investment. We are the
world leader in desktop virtualization and the scale of this deployment further
extends our leadership position.

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in