Client Computing Re-defined

The client computing domain is witnessing a lot of traction of late, with a flood of tablet PCs being launched by vendors in various shapes and prices. All of a sudden, the end-user is seriously looking at this new alternative to desktops and notebooks and quite a few are actually using it as an alternative to notebooks while on the move. This has caused a flurry of activity in the apps market with vendors coming with software and services that not only work but are compatible with different mobile devices. People now actually question the very existence of the desktop PC in the form we are used to seeing it for the past two decades. The world of client computing is moving on from stagnancy to mobility and consumers need solutions, both hardware and software, to sustain this trend. Look at your client PC as a hardware agnostic device that can be taken along with you without affecting your applications or the data stored across them. Cloud computing plays an important role here and so does tech like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In the cloud, you can look at services that host your OS and apps, as well as the data, so you need not worry about being at your desk to access your client platform. WebOS is one such service. VDI uses virtualization to achieve the same the same goal, and multiple users within an office can use the same PC to access their desktop environment. The computing load shifts from the workstation to the server in this case and thus you need to provision for IT infrastructure resources within your data center.

There are also applications that use the power of cloud to let users access and work on a document from different devices, across different places. Dropbox is one such cloud-based service that uses minimal bandwidth to do this task. The coming years shall see operating systems that work seamlessly across devices---regardless of their being a desktop PC, notebook or tablet. Android 4.0 and Windows 8 are two products that shall enable such usage.