3 Reasons Netbooks are Not Enterprise Ready: IT Pros Speak
Netbooks have attractive charms such as price and portability. But amid all the current netbook hype, IT professionals say that today's netbooks do not have the size, power or security features that they'd need to be primary machines for enterprise users.
- 16 April, 2009 09:50
- Comments 1
Sales of lightweight, low-powered mini-laptops, widely known as netbooks, have been growing rapidly with consumers during the past six months and are predicted to stay on this path. And the tech industry can't seem to get enough of talking about netbooks these days; the hype meter has been clicking up steadily for months. But do these little engines really have a place in the enterprise?
The answer is "not yet", according to IT professionals interviewed for this story. On the bright side, most netbooks on the market do provide enough CPU power, storage and wireless connectivity, not to mention low enough prices and easy portability, to be attractive to enterprises, IT pros say. (Netbooks will likely also become more appealing to enterprises as more corporate resources move to the cloud and are accessible on the Web, analysts say.)
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But the negatives outweigh the positives when you consider netbooks as primary machines at enterprises, many IT vets say.
Paradoxically, this is good news for Microsoft, which runs Windows XP on nearly all netbooks, backed up by Intel's low-power Atom processors. Both companies want to keep netbooks small and inexpensive to prevent them from stealing sales away from conventional laptops, a large and profitable market.
Yet the IT pros interviewed for this story expressed a desire to have netbooks be bigger and faster. This presents a conundrum for Microsoft: OEM's could beef up netbook specs -- perhaps add bigger screens, more ports and faster chips to please enterprises -- thus making netbooks a more legitimate, but still cheaper, competitor to laptops.
Here are IT professionals' big three gripes about today's netbooks.
Too Small, Too Slow
Many IT managers cite the diminutive size of netbooks, lack of encryption features and the potential for theft or loss as liabilities, leading them to view netbooks more as a complement to a desktop or laptop computer.
Stephen Laughlin, Director of IT at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, takes a hard stance against netbooks in the enterprise. He says he's not ruling out netbooks for the future, but for now, he's not switching to netbooks anytime soon.
"I would consider moving some users to netbooks once they have more computing power, faster CPU, bigger hard drives, bigger keyboard and bigger screens," he says.
Laughlin emphasizes that his enterprise staffers, like many others, want computers that are robust and powerful, and that having an inexpensive netbook merely as a backup machine defeats the intended purpose of saving money.
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Comments
Anonymous
The reason: enterprises not ready for netbooks
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding on how netbooks should be used.
Those devices were never designed to take all local tasks of desktops or powerful notebooks. The only logical and cost effective way to use them is related to internal or outsourced cloud computing.
Do not store data on them - just create connection to your server farm and deliver the desktop using either Citrix (expensive) or 2X (www.2x.com - cheap and reliable).
I have just about 100 of Asus 901 and Dell Inspirons 1210 with wireless cards, also equipped with Radix software locking the entire configuration.
Outcomes: low maintenance costs, full security of data resources, easy applications deployment process. Wireless gateway on your network allows only for traffic through your firewall, and blocks all unwanted connections (also notebook itself can only connect to yout gateway and start the session - there is nothing you can do locally).
If you think about centralising application delivery and cutting maintenance costs - the good way to start is to convert your mobile fleet to this model, with despktops following later.
Again, all desktops can be replaced easily by a similar light solution (much more cost effective than embedded terminals). I have recently used Asus EeeBox for this purpose.
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