Muller alights on lean client solution

NEWS Muller - a yoghurt manufacturer - has turned its back on PCs, and installed 200 windows-based ThinSTAR lean clients from NCD. Muller employees are now able to run Microsoft office and other applications, which sit on a central server supplied by Hewlett-Packard. Jim Huntington, Muller's it manager, said the company rejected PCs because it was concerned with their total cost of ownership. Nick Gorringe, research and development manager at basilica computing, the St Albans-based reseller which carried out the lean client implementation, explained Muller had several reasons for choosing the NCD products over rival thin clients. "for a start, the terminals are mostly used by admin staff, and Muller was hacked off with buying overweight clients," he said. Muller also had a short time to roll out it infrastructure to support a new, £25m PC-based distribution system, and saw the NCD technology as the quickest route. Another factor was that the company's previous system, running windows for workgroups and NetWare 3.12, was not millennium compliant. Basilica's Gorringe denied the NCD lean clients run applications slower than if they were run locally on PCs, and added: "for once, the technology does what it says it does." Muller's Huntington said: "we do not envisage making any significant purchases of PCs in the future."