Wait till it breaks before upgrading say PC buyers

By RICHARD WOOD

The days of replacing business personal computers in a three-year cycle are over as enterprises stretch the life of their hardware and adopt a "wait until it breaks" strategy.

"I think organisations are questioning why we need to upgrade. If we can stretch it out then why not?" says researcher Peter Hind.

For many years PC hardware and software upgrades were locked together. Operating system and office software upgrades required increasing processing power to take advantage of their features, and faster processors created the power for new software functionality.

Today most companies are happy with the base software on their PCs and IT bosses acknowledge there is no need to keep increasing the processing grunt on the desk. With tight budgets the money can be better spent elsewhere.

The business sector accounts for 60 per cent of PC sales in the New Zealand market.

Effectively stretching the lifecycle of corporate PCs from three years to five years over a two-year period would knock 5 per cent off the total PC market over that time. If even half of smaller business users did the same it would be another 5 per cent cut.

Hind said the major reasons for upgrading hardware had gone. "The reason they had it was not so much to get the new technology. It was to try and maintain a common desktop."

One of the ways this "standard operating environment" was now able to be maintained was by the growing use of "thin client" technology.

This allowed for a centralised common view of the computing applications to be delivered to every desktop, no matter whether it was a new or old PC, or even a low-cost terminal device.

NZI Insurance IT manager Roger Martin said "the refresh treadmill" was why NZI was an early adopter of thin client technology in the late 1990s.

"I said enough's enough. We need to do something that is more sensible because you spend all your time going around all the PCs, which is 1000 for us, and keep on refreshing them."

One of the good things of a thin client environment was that you did not have to rush into PC buying decisions.

"We've still got 1994 486-based computers knocking around the show and they're still doing a function. You only buy when it breaks, you don't have to buy because of the refresh cycle."

Transpower's IT&T technical architect, Jonathan Shennan, said the more thin client you had the more life you could get out of your old PCs. The company has 600 users and moved to thin client two years ago using minimum specified PCs.

"The PC replacement cycle must drop significantly. We are actively moving to a 'break-fix' where it's 20 per cent replacement every year."

John Bessey, Australian general manager at systems integrator Gen-I, is one industry salesman who has sold PCs in New Zealand, and now pushes thin client at Gen-I.

He said the many PCs bought around Y2K could still be used and companies may well buy PCs outright at the end of the common three-year lease deals. They would be cheap and the only issue he saw was that 3-year-old PCs would not have warranties.

Gartner analyst Andy Woo dismissed suggestions that corporate interest in thin client technology would undermine PC sales. Woo said that in reality PCs lasted only three years before they started deteriorating and so still needed to be replaced.

Further, he said, thin client was "fundamentally a software story" and would impact only in specific industries where there were standardised applications across client Machines.