Reducing Cost and Going Green Orginally posted on the BCS Website on 26 Jan 2009
If you look around the average large office you will typically see a mixture of desktops and laptops. Traditionally, users who needed to travel or work out-of-hours were granted the luxury of a laptop, and those that didn't had a desktop. In some organisations the trend has shifted to laptops for all, with the desktop slowly becoming extinct, and there are some key factors as to why this is.
It is now very trendy for companies to cite how 'green' they are; how much CO2 they are saving each month, and how many rainforests they are preserving every year, but for most organisations, going green is all about one thing, Cost.
As the natural resources on our planet become more scarce and the global demand for those resources increases, the cost of powering your IT hungry organisation increases at an alarming rate. Every user needs a computer, and with that computer comes allocated desk space complete with lighting and heating. All of which incurs a cost on that headcount.
How do companies reduce this costly overhead? By addressing how they equip the user's 'desktop space'.
Business laptops have become significantly cheaper over the past few years. If you apply the normal discount rules that large organisations enjoy with their hardware vendors, most laptop bundles cost about the same as their desktop equivalents. Even so, this isn't enough to trigger a paradigm shift towards mobile computing. To understand why the desktop is falling out of favour we have to compare the total cost of ownership (TCO) between the two form factors.
A TCO analysis should take into consideration several cost factors during a products life and obviously, the lower the TCO the cheaper it is to have that product in your estate. Picking a few of these factors, it can be shown that deploying laptops over desktops can incur a significant cost saving.
The first of these is as mentioned above, the actual purchase cost; laptops are now the same purchase cost as desktops, and will become cheaper as manufacturing costs fall, as already seen in the rapidly expanding netbook market. Secondly is power consumption (this is the green bit); the average business desktop consumes approximately 140 watts during average use whereas the average laptop consumes only about 25 watts. That's a power saving of over 80%. Scale those numbers up across an estate of 20,000 users, and that's a significant cost saving. Due to health and safety guidelines you can’t remove the desktop monitors from laptop user's desks, so the power consumption of those still has to be factored in as well.
By equipping all users with laptops, you free them up from their desks. This in turn can reduce costs as you can switch to a hot-desking system and have 20% less desks than actual users on the basis that a certain number will be working-from-home or on a client site, at any particular time. Studies have also shown that most people when given a laptop by their employer actually work longer hours than if they had a desktop. Ask an employee to stay late on Friday and they'll probable refuse. Ask them to logon over the weekend for an hour or so, and they won’t see it as such an imposition. Ergo, by making your workforce mobile, you create an enabler for greater productivity.
So, laptops are great. You can reduce your power usage, and you can turn off a few lights, and turn down the heating due to less people working in your building. However with a radical re-think of your desktop environment, you can go a lot further down the green-IT road.
This alternative to both desktops and laptops is of course, thin clients. A lot of large organisations are reluctant to embrace thin client technology, but from the green-IT angle they cannot be argued against. A typical basic thin client terminal can draw as little as 6 watts when in use; that's less than 5% of the power usage of a standard desktop. For every desktop in your organisation you can power over twenty thin clients. You can even power four thin clients for every laptop. Of course there is the initial cost of the design and implementation of the server side infrastructure to consider, be it Citrix or Terminal Services, but if your organisation is truly serious about going green, then this up-front spend makes financial sense over the long term.
Like laptops, thin client technology also frees the users from their desks. Almost everyone has, or has access to, a personal computer outside of work, and by equipping them with a logon key-fob and a web portal into your infrastructure they can work remotely and all the cost saving arguments for laptop users apply, without the cost of the laptop.
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