Sanjeev Shetty, director of IT at Time Warner Cable in Greensboro, N.C., is using streaming technology to manage the desktop application environments in the company's 300-seat call center. Shetty says he considered thin clients but couldn't justify the back-end server farm investment required to support an architecture for Microsoft Terminal Services or Citrix Systems Inc.'s Presentation Server (previously MetaFrame).

Instead, he installed Ardence Desktop from Ardence Inc. in Waltham, Mass. It creates and stores complete system images on a server and streams portions of the operating system and applications to desktop users at boot-up. "It didn't require a large investment in server infrastructure and provided immediate ROI," Shetty says.

Application streaming technology takes advantage of the fact that LANs are getting faster -- and that most applications require only a small fraction of the total program code in order to run. The minimum needed can be as little as 10 percent to 15 percent, says Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst at IDC.

Once the user is up and running, additional application and operating system components are fetched as needed. After the initial launch of a program, some products allow portions of the applications to reside in a local cache for faster subsequent loads. The result: Applications can be maintained and updated on central servers but run on the end user's local machine. The issue of managing locally installed programs on individual desktops is eliminated.

"This concept is new. It's part of the trend toward on-demand computing and utility computing," says Michael Kantrowitz, CEO of Neoware Systems Inc. in King of Prussia, Pa.