Web-based Windows apps aren't PI in the sky

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 25 June 2006 14:38

Business IT - Technology

Plans by PI, the company founded by Microsoft's former third ranked senior executive, Paul Maritz, to launch a set of web-based applications has prompted fresh speculation as to when Microsoft will offer such products. Meanwhile, a small Australian company already has commercially available technology that can make hosted Office applications available via a Web browser.

Sydney-based NetLeverage has developed a unit selling for less than A$5000 that, it claims, enables up to 10,000 Windows, Linux or Mac PCs to share any Windows application running under Microsoft's standard application server environment.

The system works with no Microsoft system software on the PC. Initial sign on is via browser and NetLeverage's technology then uses a remote desktop protocol (RDP) client (see below) which is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux to provide access to the remote application. Alternatively, the applications can be accessed through a standard web browser on the client machine.

Access to the shared applications is via the NetLeverage ThinPoint unit which sits in the data centre and, in addition to serving up to 10,040 concurrent users is able to connect these to as many as 255 application servers.

The market leading technology for shared access to Windows applications is Citrix, but according to NetLeverage CEO and CTO, Steven Hasani, this requires a Citrix server and Microsoft Terminal Server, in addition to servers hosting the actual applications, for at least every forty concurrent users to be served. He claimed that ThinPoint was "Citrix done right from the ground up".

However according to Hasani the real cost savings to be gained from using the ThinPoint system are in support costs, because ThinPoint is a "set and forget" solution.

NetLeverage claims that one law firm with 1000 employees replaced an existing remote terminal access system with its ThinPoint system and reduced total cost of ownership over three years from $A4.14 million to $A592,000 with the bulk of these saving being achieved in technical support costs. These were $1 million per year for the superseded system and a mere $9,000 per year for the ThinPoint system.

Sydney based IT services company, ac3, is using the ThinPoint technology to offer 'software as a service', hosting of client applications in its data centre accessed via the ThinPoint system.

It claims this configuration can provide significant cost savings over maintaining multiple copies of applications at each of a number of sites. It gives the example of a government department with 20 remote sites each with an average of 10 users per site and each running a copy of a bespoke application. "Data is stored [in each of the data centres] with very little security and even less reliability. System support requires two technical staff who visit centres on a regular basis," according to ac3.

Total cost of ownership of this solution was around $A3 million over three years including almost $A1 million in support costs, but ac3 claims to have provided a hosted solution with access via ThinPoint at a cost of just A$1.02 million over three years, with zero support costs.

NetLeverage was founded in 1999, it has been selling ThinPoint for about two years. According to Hasani, it has 610 customers. There appears to be significant growth potential for the product: Hasani said most of these were in the company's home state of NSW and it does not yet have any distribution outside Australia.

• What is RDP?
Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is a multi-channel protocol that allows a user to connect to a computer running Microsoft Terminal Services. It is based on the ITU T.share protocol (also known as T.128). According to Wikipedia, the first version of RDP (called version 4.0) was introduced with Terminal Services in Windows NT 4.0 Server. The current version of Windows Server (2003) runs RDP version 5.2. Version 6.0, which will be introduced with Windows Vista and Windows Server 'Longhorn', will include a significant number of new features.