Betting on Windows NT

A lonely IBM PC awaited Lloyd Liggett in January 1983,when he arrived in Southwest Florida to open Northern Trust, the venerable Chicago bank. The IBM personal computer sat unused and unloved, because no one knew how to use it. The desktop PC was probably state of the art in 1983, for it had two floppy disks, not much memory, and no hard disk. Liggett put it to work. Today, continuing as a technology driver, he helps Northern Trust fully exploit the capabilities of high-powered servers and desktop computers, most of which run Windows NT 4.0.

That was Then.

PCs were not considered serious business machines in most corporations in the early 1980s. They could not compete with the big mainframes on which billion-dollar companies like Northern Trust relied. But the renegade PC has come a very long way since Liggett first used it to automate bookkeeping chores at the teller level. The IBM PC, running Lotus 123, replaced adding machine tapes and mental calculations for a dramatic improvement in accuracy at the end of each banking day.

This is Now.

The PC on Lloyd Liggett's desk today is a 200mhz Pentium whose power exceeds that old IBM PC several hundredfold. But its real strength derives from the world-class operating system that powers it: Windows NT 4.0. Northern Trust's NT-based environment spreads mainframe-like power through 5 regional branches. Many business executives might find the pervasive use of NT surprising. Common wisdom puts Windows 95 on the desktop and NT on the server. Of course, many of you may still stick with Windows 3.x as an aging but reliable solution.

Wherever you sit on the operating system continuum, you may want to pay careful attention to why Northern Trust has made a big, early bet on Windows NT. It all has to do with turning PCs into manageable, secure, stable, powerful, networked competitive weapons.

In 1983 IBM PCs were powered by a very basic and severely limited operating system, MS DOS. It could only do one thing at a time; it didn't permit networking to other computers, and it featured a pretty steep learning curve. Nonetheless, this hapless operating system and the IBM PC were at the core of a computing revolution that turned a curiosity into an essential business weapon.

Ten years after Lloyd Liggett's arrival in Southwest Florida, Microsoft introduced Windows NT, which was an operating system of a different color. Microsoft had hired the lead developer of VMS, a high-powered operating system used in Digital Equipment minicomputers, to develop state-of-the-art technology for the PC. NT was built from the ground up to function in mission-critical, networked, computing environments, unlike Windows 95, which still contained vestiges of the old PC DOS structure. There was an important reason for this.

Microsoft developed successive versions of PC operating systems with a dual mission: improve functionality while permitting clients to continue using all their old software. If they had created a new operating system that required all new applications, their users might have been tempted to try something different, like the Mac, OS/2 or UNIX. After all, if you had to go out and buy all new applications, why not check out other types of computers?

Windows 95 arrived with much fanfare in August 1995. Gates and company touted it as the Second Coming, an easy-to-use, Macintosh-like 32-bit operating system that would change the way the people used computers. The excessive hype worked. The number of users went from 0 to 100 million in two years. Arguably, Win95's success may turn out to be the final nail in Apple Computer's coffin.

The Good and the Bad

In fact, Windows 95 is a very mixed blessing. It is easier to use than its predecessors. It does provide more functionality. And it usually doesn't force users to throw away their old, but reliable software applications. That said, it is also a frequently unreliable and problematic product that drives users and technicians to distraction. But, worst of all, it is a dead end.

Northern Trust's technology consultant, John Oney, terms Windows 95 as a "patch," adding that Microsoft never intended it to be part of a long-term computing architecture. In fact, Oney predicts that its planned successor, Windows 98, may never appear as a product; and even if it does arrive in 1998, it will disappear by 2000. How can Oney bet so confidently on Windows NT? A bit of recent history explains it.

Microsoft, always planning for the end game, knew that winning the operating systems wars required maneuvering software developers into supporting their designated survivor, Windows NT. Microsoft accomplished this by pairing Windows 95 and Windows NT in the public mind as sister 32-bit operating systems: Win 95 for the desktop and Windows NT for the server. Both would be important. But every software company knew that Win95 would be very pervasive, very quickly. Therefore, receiving the Microsoft stamp of approval, that is, putting the "Designed for Windows 95" logo on the software box, was a prerequisite for participating in that success. Here's the catch: in order to get the coveted logo, developers had to build their software so that it would also run on Windows NT. Gotcha!

Some observers may see this as a rather cynical strategy, but Microsoft needed to make the migration to Windows NT inevitable. Cynical or not, Windows NT is clearly a far superior operating system to Win95. And it will be the long-term survivor. In this light, Northern Trust in Southwest Florida looks smarter all the time.

NT Makes Sense

Northern Trust serves 120 Windows NT users with seven servers. All are linked to a network spanning Naples, Bonita Springs and Fort Myers, which is linked in turn to Northern Trust in Miami and Chicago. Some Windows 95 users exist in the system; these employees are running old but essential banking applications that do not yet support NT.

By making an early bet on Windows NT, Northern Trust already benefits from a secure, reliable, and scalable networked computing environment. As NT power and functionality improve, the bank can quickly deploy new solutions and technology. John Oney stresses that NT can be easily managed remotely from his laptop (which also runs NT, by the way), whether he is at Trade Center Way or in a hotel in Chicago.

For Northern Trust, Windows NT made both strategic and financial sense. Lloyd Liggett concludes, "In a world of restricted salary dollars and tight capital budgets, we have enabled one person to manage an entire system."

The Bottom Line

You may not have 150 PCs networked among many offices, but Windows NT is in your future. The only question is when.

As a start, you may wish to put NT on your replacement PCs or on a dedicated server. In addition, if you rely on outside support to maintain your network, ask your service provider if they could manage you remotely more reliably and less expensively if you were usin