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Thinking Thin

Pat Speer October 2006

You don't hear much about thin client computing these days. As yet another new tool on the shelf, thin computing was the rage in the mid-1990s, as financial institutions clamored to provide control and security at the desktop by providing networked PCs that held and controlled data at the host.

Not gone and certainly not forgotten, thin client computing is experiencing yet another surge in popularity.

By 2010, roughly 30% of U.S. financial institutions of all sizes will be using thin clients for at least a portion of their core business operations, notes Boston- based research firm Celent LLC, which predicts about 60,000 workstation installations overall. In the insurance sector, the increase may be more rapid: Approximately 10% of customer service reps and claims/underwriting processing clerks could move to thin-terminals before the end of 2008, predicts Celent.

Jack Wilson isn't surprised. Amerisure Mutual Insurance Co. brought Wilson in two years ago to help establish an IT strategy. As an enterprise architect who functions at the director level in Amerisure's IT department, Wilson saw what the company was using, and "didn't hesitate to recommend thin clients," he says.

To accommodate the company's 800 employees and 150 independent agents at core service centers throughout the United States, the 100-year-old Farmington Hills, Mich., provider of workers' compensation insurance grew from using a mainframe in the 1960s to midrange systems, to several larger servers residing in several locations.

"Nothing got replaced," he says, "it was just added to the next layer."

Those layers meant that no two PCs were the same, each holding a mix of corporate software versions and personal software, such as games.

"We had a lot of problems with people having different versions of Adobe, and our help desk had a hard time managing that environment," he says. "We realized that to create a more productive work environment, we needed to be flexible and adaptable, and restrict the data and software used at the desktop."

Amerisure's evaluation pointed to another revelation: The company's unique business model did not require a mainframe, much less 24/7, 365-day access to the data.

"The nature of our business is that we don't run 1,000 transactions a minute, much less in a day," Wilson says. "And we realized we needed to implement an IT strategy that would match our business model."

TAKING A FORWARD LOOK

Instead of focusing most of his attention evaluating the systems of the past, however, Wilson decided to take the company forward. In establishing the insurer's new platform, the company opted for the Citrix Access on-demand solution from Citrix, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-not as an end solution, but as an interim strategy to Web-based applications.

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