Michael Kanellos 04 08 09, 9:26 PM

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The Case for Ditching PCs

$4,500 a month.

That’s the amount that Trent Ratcliff, the IT Infrastructure Manager for the Regional Transportation District (RTD) in Denver, says he will be able to cut his power bills once his agency replaces 800 desktop PCs with 800 thin clients and back-end servers.

“It’s over $50,000 a year,� he says.

The agency has already installed 400 of the machines and the rest will go in in a few weeks. On top of that he expects to save close to $600,000 in hardware and maintenance costs over the next eight years. The overall network he oversees has about 1,000 notebooks and desktops on it.

Thin clients — which are essentially terminals that scrape data and information from servers in a computing room — have historically been the girlie man option in the corporate workplace. Nobody requested one. In many places, getting one was a sign that you were probably destined for a long career on the help desk.

Contracting budgets and rising power prices, along with improved performance of these devices, however, has begun to change the picture. And the thin or PC debate could become one of the big corporate computing issues in 2010. While you can argue whether or not the switch makes sense -- PC advocates will point out things like application compatibility and productivity -- the thin client advocates will probably be able to put up at least some kind of hard numbers to prove their case for lower operating costs. Either way, it will be discussed.

“It is something everyone has to consider,� Ratcliff said, who has also been evangelizing the concept to co-workers in other departments.

Another factor that will push adoption: Utilities like Xcel Energy are offering (or planning to offer) subsides to companies to switch.

If this becomes a trend, it’s good news for a wide variety of companies. VMware will sell more virtualization software, which effectively allows the server to act as the brains for multiple desktops simultaneously. Hewlett-Packard sells servers as well as software for optimizing thin clients. Then of course there are the terminal companies themselves like Wyse (which sells boxes to RTD) and NComputing (which has installed over a million thin of its roughly $100 thin clients worldwide in the last two years). See perhaps the finest thin client movie ever made here.

But it could make like a little more difficult for sales people hawking notebooks.