Utility Style IT Departments – A myth or an inevitable reality?


All small and medium size companies continue to struggle with the perils and costs associated with starting and scaling their IT infrastructure to support growth or strategic goals. Few, however, realize there is a better way than simply deploying PC’s, laptops, and the many servers and IT personnel needed to support them. For many, there is a better way�and easier, too…

The Traditional Approach

Most companies follow the same old path of beginning IT operations; they go out and procure PC’s, laptops, servers, and a lot of people to support them. The only real decisions they make are what brand, whether or not they are Unix or Windows platforms, and what software applications they’ll deploy on them (and pray). Today, this approach to deploying IT infrastructure and services is somewhat akin to building a hydroelectric dam to power just your house.

Stuck in the Status Quo

For many small and medium sized businesses, executives and IT management simply get stuck in the typical late majority rut and remain skeptical of accepting new technology or ideas until they are more widely adopted by a majority of their industry peers. Not that many of these people aren’t early adopters or innovators, many are. The usual reason for blindly following the traditional path is that they often don’t have the time or resources to conduct a thorough technical and financial evaluation of new technologies. Also, many simply believe in the perceived “less risk� in the conventional PC deployment.

Challenging the Status Quo – Think Thin

One alternative to the traditional (PC) approach and available for many years now is thin-client technology. It has been proven time and again that, in many cases, thin-client deployments are far and away very efficient, less expensive and far less problematic than the traditional PC or client/server model. The model throws out the conventional wisdom of computing and allows an “Utility� approach in getting IT services. Not only are thin-client deployments easier and far less costly to manage, they offer a plethora of other advantages over the traditional approach such as reliability, serviceability, availability, flexibility, and inherent user productivity gains do to the purpose-designed and centrally controlled desktop environment. The centralized nature of the model is highly secure, easy to upgrade, backup and scale.

At their most minimal, thin clients are little more than local networks ports connecting a screen, keyboard and mouse to a remote server. They cost as little as $200 per unit, and require virtually no local maintenance. Modern diskless clients are small enough to be mailed to users, and a faulty device is as easily changed as a light-bulb with no loss of data, which is quite unimaginable in the current PC-oriented computing world.

A New Crest On a Not-So-Old Wave

Enter Gencosys, Inc., a Silicon Valley upstart that has advanced the thin-client model to a different level by integrating open source applications and thin-client technology into a hosted ASP solution. This fusion of technologies has produced another alternative to the traditional approach by creating a new slant on the concept of utility computing.

Gencosys’ solution allows organizations large or small to offer application and desktop IT services at a fraction of the cost of deploying fat-clients and essentially becomes the customer’s IT department. Instead of procuring PC’s, servers, software, and all the people to required to support an internal IT environment, the customer simply subscribes to Gencosys’ service and Gencosys ships or installs the desired thin-client desktops. The ultra-thin client connect to Gencosys Computing Exchange (GCX) and all the data are stored in a secure and redundant data center. Users are given a SmartCard that provides instant access to the “Computing CanvasTM� from any Gencosys device.

Removing Compexity – Keeping it Simple

The essence of the Gencosys's service is its simplicity. Simple device, simple pricing and simplified IT model allowing business to focus on their core business and let IT be handled by a large scale IT department. The data center aggregation provides the Utility model with a immense cost advantage against conventional PC based services.

For more information, please go to www.gencosys.com or email [email protected].