How Fat is Your Thin Client? Observations from the PeopleSoft 2000 Users Conference.

• Author: Miranda, Rowan
• Position: Brief Article

Over the past three years, GFOA has provided consulting services to more than three dozen state and local governments that have chosen to pursue a strategy of integrating information and business processes through enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Having negotiated contracts in excess of $100 million, GFOA's work has given the organization greater familiarity with the major ERP products--AMS, Lawson, J.D. Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP--that provide an integrated suite of modules in addition to financial accounting and HR/payroll. To track the evolution of these products and to have GFOA better advise its clients and members, firms such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP have invited GFOA representatives to their annual user conferences. This column highlights the issue of Internet-based enterprise systems that is the major feature of PeopleSoft 8.

Modern enterprise software packages evolved from mainframe products. Mainframe applications sped high-volume tasks such as payroll calculations, journal entries, and accounts payable processing. The "host" was the mainframe itself and the "client" was typically a "dumb" terminal that provided a rigid interface for data entry. The client/server revolution of the 1990s provided the opportunity for distributed computing and graphical user interfaces (GUIs)--users got a "Windows" like environment where they could point and click to process transactions and build and analyze reports. Just as the client/ server revolution was settling in, the Internet exploded.

While the client/server model had advantages over the mainframe, it also imposed maintenance costs because ERP vendors were releasing software upgrades every six to 12 months. Not only would new versions of the software have to be deployed on the servers, but the clients (e.g., PCs) also would need new application logic on their hard drives (i.e., fatclients). The upgrade of an ERP package sometimes meant new PCs would need to be purchased because the memory and disk requirements had expanded. This led to issues of "total cost of ownership" of one package versus another and some firms quickly saw Internet-based applications as a solution to this problem and the opportunity to integrate back-office (e.g., accounting, purchasing, and payroll) with front-office applications (e.g., e-commerce, customer relationship management (CRM), and Web-based citizen service products). Vendors soon argued who among them had the "thinnest" client...