It may seem strange to question HP’s commitment to thin clients when it has just fleshed out its portfolio with the $214m acquisition of Neoware. However, the true test of HP’s support for the technology is not to be found in the deal itself, but in how the firm integrates its expanded thin client range with its desktop division.

HP quickly announced that Neoware will be integrated into its Business Desktop Unit line and insisted thin clients represent an important “component” in an overall computing strategy - the implication being that it is a strategy that still very much includes PCs.

But the question for HP is how big a “component” do thin clients represent.

Pure-play thin client vendors, such as Neoware, have long maintained that the proportion of the desktop PC market they could eat into is far larger than the PC vendors have publicly admitted. They argue that confining thin clients to their traditional contact centre stronghold is short-sighted and that there are compelling cost, security, maintenance and not least environmental reasons for having many more knowledge workers using thin-client systems.

With thin clients using up to 90 percent less energy than PCs, HP now faces a huge test of its new green strategy as it decides whether to continue with Neoware’s aggressive evangelising of the technology.

Will HP start telling its major corporate accounts that their next hardware refresh should see full desktop PCs replaced with thin clients for all knowledge workers, as Neoware would surely have done? Or will thin clients play second fiddle to the larger desktop business?

If it goes with the former option regardless of the in-roads thin client technology makes into its PC business, then this could mark the beginning of the end for desktop PCs, which are viewed as increasingly unsustainable in light of environmental concerns.

Alternatively, if HP goes with the latter option and continues to push PCs as the default solution, then it will become apparent that the firm is not as serious about the environment as it claims to be.