Thin clients boom due to cost/security benefits

The 'thin client' computing market grew by almost 50 percent in Australia last year due to reduced costs and increased security, said industry analyst IDC.

A record number of 42,012 units sold in 2003 with Sun Microsystems experiencing the largest sales increase of 102 percent on the previous year, according to a new IDC report.

Thin client sales are expected to grow at an annual rate of 20.4 percent per year until 2008, while the expected annual growth of all computers is only expected to reach 12.6 percent by the end of this year.

Thin clients are potentially more secure than ordinary desktops because they have no disk space of their own and run all applications from a central server.

"The efforts of local vendors to educate the Australian market on the benefits of thin client devices are paying off," said Michael Sager, market analyst for PC hardware at IDC.

IDC said the top three vendors of thin client solutions for 2003 were Wyse with market share of 64.6 percent, Hewlett Packard at 14.8 percent and Sun with 7.6 percent.