Thin Client, Thick Cache

I was having dinner last week with an IT director at a large telecom company, and he was telling me about his goal of removing as much software as he could from the desktops and laptops in his company. He still hadn’t switched from Outlook to OWA, but he said he thought that Microsoft might be close to getting OWA to a point where he could. Other applications, like his CRM and collaborations systems, already come through the browser.

I explained how, at Mobolize, we often talk about how the web browser has become the “universal client” for business applications and he agreed with that description. He added that it’s the “universal thin client” – right on.

He understands what our CacheFront software does, giving the browser the kind of large, dedicated caches that give the IT team the maximum improvements in page load time and bandwidth use. Even though they have plenty of WAN optimization installed on their network, CacheFront will still save them plenty on the “last mile” to the end user’s computer.

He then coined a phrase that marks him as a secret marketer at heart, saying that what he wanted was “thin client, thick cache.” I’ve never been so happy to be called thick!