Astric Computers looks forward to innovation with NComputing in education

Even in the best of times, IT budgets for school education departments have been limited and erratic with restrictions in maintaining time lines each year, year on year. In good budget years, there has been some funding to upgrade computer labs and update educational software. In bad years, funding has been severely squeezed. The recent economic downturn has placed tremendous funding pressure on school education departments elsewhere but in India it has not affected the computerization process in government and government aided schools. Yet the movement has been rather slow as the budget is in installment and impacts IT capital and maintenance budgets. In addition to the funding pressure, education departments also face resource challenges with regards to handling desktops and other IT infrastructures and are mostly dependent on maintenance staff.

Astric Computers' Centre of Excellence (COE) is associated with NComputing, USA to promote shared computing devices in Bihar which is a real revolution in the field of desktop shared computing. This is going to be the future of rural India because of its unique proposition of 1 watt power consumption, 50% less cost of acquisition, no maintenance and total saving on OS and Software. Tight budgets per school per year have forced cuts or freezes in most education departments, giving more stress on learning skills than IT infrastructure. While departments and their IT professionals grapple with budget and resource constraints, almost all states and their districts are striving to improve educational outcomes by integrating technology with the classroom learning experience. Instead of occasional trips to a shared computer lab, educators want to provide wide scale computer access directly in the computer labs.

NComputing's desktop virtualization solution offers IT staff and educators a proven way to provide wide-scale computing access throughout the school while keeping capital and support costs in line. In the recent period of about 3 years NComputing has touched lives of about 21mn users worldwide specifically in education segment. In India alone the numbers of schools have risen to almost 30,000 in last one year and another 30,000 or more are likely to be in queue to equip their school labs.

Desktop virtualization has helped reach out to those children who would never be able to work on an ICT tool called ‘computer' via projects like ICT@School and CAL under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan. Till now almost 8000+ schools in Andhra Pradesh, 1500 schools in Uttar Pradesh, 2000 schools in Rajasthan, 2600+ schools in Haryana, almost 4000 schools in Punjab, 600 schools in Bihar, 600 schools in Assam, Himachal Pradesh & Chhattisgarh along with a few more states who are in the tendering process have selected desktop virtualization from NComputing. The reasons for choosing the world leader in shared computing are reduction in upfront cost of hardware reduction in electricity bills and reduction in maintenance costs.

The concept behind virtual desktops is simple. Today's PCs are so powerful that most people only use a small fraction of its power. Desktop virtualization enables a single PC to be "virtualized" (or shared) by many users-with each user getting his/her own computing session. Depending on the configuration, a single PC can have 2 to 31 simultaneous users. The shared computing solution or virtual desktops from NComputing has 3 components. First, access devices that connect the user's monitor/peripherals to the host computer. Secondly, vSpaceTM software which virtualizes the host computer to create multiple sessions and thirdly, User Protocol which transmits the data and video signals between the user and the host computer.

By combining these three components into a seamless, integrated solution, NComputing delivers a full-motion, no-compromises user experience. Selected by 30,000 schools in India, the NComputing virtual desktops have been selected by nearly 30,000 schools in about 2years 6months. Over 3 lac students, faculty, librarians and administrators use NComputing every day in urban and rural schools, in public and private schools, in large and small districts. These schools have all realized tangible and measurable benefits by deploying NComputing.

The most attractive benefit of desktop sharing is clearly its low cost. NComputing solution starts at about 4000/-per seat (compared to 25000/- or more for stand-alone education PCs). Even with the additional cost of peripherals and licenses, most districts can save 75% on upfront acquisition costs alone.