More details have emerged of the e-PC appliance strategy Hewlett-Packard unveiled Monday. The compact corporate desktop alternatives will be half the size, and half the weight of a conventional PC, according to Eric Cador, worldwide VP and general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s business desktop division in Grenoble, France. But they will be as powerful as any conventional Windows desktop, and HP plans to offer models sporting the full range of Intel CPUs from low-end Celerons to faster Pentium IIIs.
The strategy is not really to compete head-to-head with Network Computer or Java Station appliances, but to offer a cheaper to buy, cheaper to own and easier to control alternative to the white-box PCs currently cluttering the desktops of transaction processing systems users. Customers will not be forced to move their applications back to a server as other thin-client approaches might dictate, Cador said. Instead, customers can preserve their desktop application legacy, while reducing complexity and cost, he claimed.
Banking and airline systems users will be at the center of HP’s e-PC radar screen when global availability commences in March or April, and ASP customers are also considered a strong potential sales target, said Cador. Some prototypes will be ready for demonstration this year, with volume product evaluation set to start in January or February.
The sealed boxes are unlikely to ship with floppy drives, but the e-PCs will offer USB connections and built-in network cards. Acqusition cost, said Cador, will be 5% to 10% cheaper than a conventional PC, but the real savings will be measured in terms of total cost of ownership, he added.
