More bang for your technology buck

How some school CIOs are wringing more efficiency from technology solutions

Across the country, school technology chiefs face a difficult challenge: Confronted with the reality of shrinking federal budgets and growing technology demands, they must do more with fewer resources at their disposal.
Though few people today dispute the notion that technology, when deployed effectively, can have a profound effect on learning, many districts still struggle to provide regular access to classroom computers for all students. And yet, by taking innovative approaches to their deployment of computers, some districts have achieved remarkable success. In South Carolina's Orangeburg Consolidated School District 4, for example, district officials have leveraged the processing power of 250 existing computers to create 750 additional student workstations--at a cost of only $250 per seat.
Ohio's Green Local School District reportedly saved about $135,000 in hardware expenses when it recently added some 300 new computer terminals. And administrators at Pennsylvania's Woodland Hills School District say they saved $460,000 when they replaced half the district's aging fleet of computers just a few years ago.
Even more remarkable than these substantial savings in hardware costs is the ease of deployment and maintenance that each district reports from its solution, which could result in significant cost savings over time. How did each school system achieve these results? Read on to find out.
Cutting costs
Randy Johnson is the director of technology for Orangeburg School District 4. Tired of constantly trying to squeeze extra years out of an already overextended crop of school computers, he agreed to test a system from California-based startup NComputing Co. last year.
NComputing aims to deliver high-end computing to more users at a fraction of the cost of buying traditional PCs, by turning a single computer into a shared network of several machines. Each additional user shares the central processing unit (CPU) and memory of the host computer. Depending on the configuration they choose, schools can support up to 30 students on a single host computer, the company says. "To be frank, I was sceptical at first about how well the product would work," said Johnson. But the system worked better than he anticipated. After a brief trial period, Johnson purchased enough of the devices for him to turn 250 desktops into 1,000 fully functional workstations.
NComputing was started by former eMachines founder and CEO Stephen Dukker. After spending most of his career developing low-cost personal computers through his eMachines brand, Dukker sold the company to Gateway Inc. and decided instead to move in another direction--a direction he believes "will revolutionize the way [schools] use computers."
Dukker's idea was to develop a chip that taps into the unused or dormant processing power on an existing CPU. Not unlike the human brain, Dukker says, most personal computers employ only a very small portion of their overall processing power when in use. Rather than increase production costs by purchasing expensive processors from leading chip makers such as Intel and AMD, he said, the company found it could reduce its costs to users dramatically by designing a device that simply borrowed its processing power from existing PCs