Let’s go over the top and assume the Cius is a killer tablet like the iPad. Will the top four PC companies now rush out NAND flash-filled tablets? My guess is yes, because Cisco’s Cius is the sexiest new business user client device in a very long time.
With its phone capability, keyboard and mouse, and video-conferencing talents, the thing looks like a fabulous combination of thin client and all-in-one mobile device. Businesses could lap this thing up in the millions and sweep away their PC help desk pain, their Windows licensing pain, their anti-virus pain, their PC maintenance pain, their … none of us like our PCs, not any more. Any delight people had with PCs evaporated long, long ago and the letters ‘PC’ might as well stand for Pitiful Crap.
Notebooks are in the same ballpark. On the desk and on our laps Wintel is a pain. Thin clients are little better as you still have to work in a Windows environment and the datacentre supporting infrastructure is costly. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure has a lot going for it but desktop images need to be stored and the system has to cope with the daily morning boot storm. Cius tablets deal with this VDI boot storm issue at a stroke; it simply goes away.
The idea of having intelligent edge-devices that need their software loaded from a networked datacentre every time they are switched on is, quite frankly, bizarre. Why on earth would any sane person want to do that when the device could boot from its own NAND flash? The notion of VDIs and thin Citrix-type clients is only viable when businesses must have a Windows environment on their desktops. Take that away and the whole monstrously unbalanced VDI and thin Windows client infrastructure falls away in an instant. That’s what the Cius tablet presages.
Were business to take the Cius tablets, there would be no need for expensive deduplicating storage arrays to hold thousands of VDI images, and the server and network infrastructure to deliver them to the thousands of waiting thin clients and PCs. Imagine the ROI on a Cius tablet installation with the slashing and burning of the PC desktop and notebook estates, the elimination of data centre-hosted Windows thin clients, and the scrapping of VDI-storing drive arrays. All that hardware, software and network bandwidth could be retired overnight. A Cius tablet rollout could pay for itself on day one with millions of dollars to spare.
Place yourself in the shoes of the chief desktop and notebook strategy officer at Acer, Dell, HP and IBM and chew on this for a while.
Is it escapable? Doesn’t seem so. Cisco has the potential here to totally shred the business desktop and VDI/thin Windows client businesses, as well as much of the notebook business. Be afraid; be very, very afraid.
What shall we do? The answer is just so blindingly obvious: me too, me too, me too, me too!!!!
Of course they will; Acer, Dell, HP and IBM will all rush out their own Cius-type tablet business desktop and notebook replacement devices. They may be Atom-powered, they may be ARM-powered, but they will certainly not be mainstream X86 and Windows-powered, not when X86 cores eat battery power and Windows licenses cost cash and Windows has not been comprehensively re-designed and modded to suit the touch-screen, NAND-flash tablet world.
It looks like Android’s time has come and ARM will get another boost into the business stratosphere. Cius looks like a Cisco masterstroke and the reverberations of its arrival will resound throughout the whole IT industry.
