Gartner Says Extending the Life Cycle of Desktop PCs Won't Necessarily Save Money on Total Cost of Ownership
STAMFORD, CONN., September 15, 2003 — Many enterprises are extending the life cycle of their desktop PCs, but they may not be saving as much money as anticipated. The average annual total cost of ownership (TCO) for a PC kept for three years is roughly the same as a PC kept for four to six years, but there are changes in who absorbs those costs, the enterprise or the end-user, according to Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT and ITB).
When extending the life cycle of desktop PCs from the typical three years up to four or more, the costs shift from those of direct cost categories such as hardware, software and IS labor to categories of indirect costs such as lost end-user productivity and downtime.
"In the end, the decision comes down to who pays," said Michael Silver, vice president and research director at Gartner. "It's either the enterprise in currency, or the user in lost productivity. Prior to making life cycle decisions, enterprises must fully understand productivity, opportunity and migration costs and come to terms with who is going to incur them."
Enterprises must also understand what factors are not included in TCO, but are still important in determining the appropriate desktop life cycle.
"Most benefits are not included in the TCO, so if an end-user can find real business benefit in having a faster or newer PC, enterprises should quantify those benefits and build a business case to reduce the life cycle toward three years," said Leslie Fiering, research vice president at Gartner. "Enterprises must also consider that keeping PCs longer will probably result in greater hardware and operating system diversity."
On the cost side, although some basic PC deployment costs are included in TCO, major operating system migrations are not. Therefore, if more migrations are incurred for a particular user because of the shorter life of a PC, higher migration costs need to be factored in, increasing the costs.
Overall, Gartner analysts recommend a four-year desktop life cycle for mainstream knowledge workers and a desktop life cycle of three years or less for high-performance users. Five years is possible in some cases, but Gartner analysts advise trying to extend the life cycle to five years for fixed-function systems only, where the application load is limited and does not change.
Additional information is available in the Gartner Research Note Desktop TCO for Years 4, 5 and 6: Someone Has to Pay. This Research Note provides a detailed breakout on the TCO for a desktop PC, and provides analysis on the impact older PCs can have for an enterprise. This report is available on the Gartner Web site.
Gartner analysts will provide additional analysis on TCO issues during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2003, which will be held October 19-24 in Orlando, Florida. Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the IT industry's largest and most strategic conference, providing business leaders with a look at the future of IT. For more details or to register for Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2003, visit www.gartner.com/us/symposium/us or call 1-800-778-1997. Members of the media can register for the event by contacting GartnerEvents@middleberg.com.
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