A pilot experiment for e-government solutions based on network computer (NC) architecture passed expert appraisals on Sunday in Beijing, indicating the possible large-scale implementation of NCs in China's e-government development in the future.

The Haidian District government, with the co-ordination of the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, has achieved great success in the pilot project with the support of the nationally recognized 863 High-Tech Project, said Xing Zhiguo, vice-head of the district government, at a press conference.

NCs promise enhanced security, easier management and lower costs, which curtail the government's expenditures in computers and boast considerable significance to the nation's e-government construction, he added.

Last year, the Beijing municipal government had envisioned implementing an NC industrialization plan, and has since decided to increase the share of NCs in its procurements in the future, officials said.

Different from personal computer (PC) architecture, all data storage, application storage and significant computing functions take place on centralized servers rather than hard discs under the NC architecture.

The pilot programme will fully enable NCs to serve as the terminal servers to deal with government e-business, including data, text and multi-media information processing, said Huai Jinpeng, vice-president and professor of the university.

Having achieved success at the pilot level, Huai said he believed the NC architecture-based solutions could be applied in the field of e-commerce since there are great similarities between e-commerce and e-government in dealing with business and information.

With self-owned intellectual property rights (IPRs), the domestically manufactured NCs will help break the dominance of Windows operating systems and Intel's CPU architecture, said Ni Guangnan, professor with the Institute of Computing under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

(China Daily August 12, 2003