Thin's back!

Another multi-part series coming up here:

Phil Osborne has been with Citrix in Australia for the last ten years, and he's watched the market for thinness growing. "So I really came in at the start of the whole concept of thin client computing. I think even the word thin client, which I guess we're stuck with now because it's the start of the whole revolution, is a little bit of a misnomer because today thin client really refers to the thinness of the connection between the end point and the data centre," says Osborne. "So that's what thin client today really means as opposed to the actual hardware that many people use."

Indeed, you don't have to have thin client hardware to run a thin client model. "In fact many people are using fat PCs in what we call a hybrid mode," says Osborne. "I have a laptop because I travel a lot and I use that both as a fully functional fat PC but I also use it in conjunction with, if you like, a thinness of connection for some of our back-office applications. I often say to people when they're trying to get their head around this, I say think of two things, where do you want the applications to run and where do you want the data to reside?

Read on...