Faced with shrinking IT budgets and an anarchic infrastructure? You're not the only one. Today, it is crucial that businesses manage their systems better than ever before.

The mainframe option - which gives one machine overall control of an organisation's desktops - may offer better value in the long-term, but the initial outlay and installation can be very off-putting.

Many companies still want the control that a mainframe can offer. Yet they don't want a mainframe. The solution? Vendors such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are trying to inject central control into their formerly anarchic systems.

Both vendors are developing software functionality to boost system management, helping to keep infrastructure costs down. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a prime purchasing factor for businesses, and the latest Mainframe Market Monitor report from analyst Xephon gives mainframes the gold star in the price contest.

Xephon reckons that ownership costs of distributed PC and Unix server infrastructures is unjustifiably high compared to mainframe infrastructures.

It defines decentralised to mean systems that are not managed or controlled centrally.

Xephon looked at factors such as support instead of focusing purely on processing power of the mainframe in comparison to PC or Unix systems.

Xephon says a mainframe costs £3,450 per user per year, compared to £10,850 per year for a decentralised PC environment.

Unix, considered more reliable than PC environments and therefore cheaper to run, comes in for a beating. Decentralised Unix costs more than centralised Unix, which clocks in at £7,350. But even that doesn't beat the mainframe.

Xephon predicts the cost gap will continue to grow. This will be driven by the upward wage spiral for skilled PC support staff, and advances in mainframe technology, which means mainframes require fewer staff each year to support them.

By 2005, says Xephon, mainframe costs will be unchanged, but the cost of a decentralised PC infrastructure will have increased by half. Centralised PC infrastructure costs will fall slightly, acting as a strong incentive to adopting a centralised server approach, even for those users who do not want to invest in mainframes.

With statistics such as these, it would be easy to make buying decisions based purely on the sort of costs measured by researchers such as Xephon.

That would be a mistake, says Clive Longbottom, senior analyst with Strategy Partners International. He says the ownership costs debate is flawed because it encourages managers to examine costs independently of a system's value to the business. This approach leads companies to strip IT infrastructure to the bone.

'It is much better for an IT department to work with users to identify ways in which IT really adds value to what they do, and then to look at ways of providing appropriate services,' says Longbottom.

'TCO, where all you do is measure how much it costs to put a PC on a desk and support it, is plain nonsense.'

Analyst GartnerGroup now admits its earlier studies, which helped establish the ownership costs issue, downplayed the fact that PC and Unix networks generate different values in different situations.

In TCO: A Critical Tool for Managing IT, Gartner says: 'It is important to note that some highly complex environments warrant higher costs (for example a stock trader) than others (for example a data entry clerk).'

Businesses have recognised this and are now looking for more sophisticated ways to control costs.

David Fowles, technology and planning manager for security company Group 4, says TCO is a big issue - especially on new projects. 'People tend to look at the project and ask how it is going to contribute to a reduction in TCO, or how it is going to stop support costs from escalating,' he says.

One solution adopted by Group 4 is to lock down control of desktops through management software - this can be bought separately or obtained though the operating system itself.

The company sets user application profiles centrally using the basic security features contained in Windows NT.

'It was noticeable that as soon as we moved to a more centralised approach the number of support calls fell sharply,' says Fowles.

'Companies have to get centralised control over the administration of their desktop assets if they want to control costs, and this goes for all distributed platforms.'

Another option is to use software licences creatively.

Clinical research company Quintiles, which used Computer Associates' TNG Unicentre to cut the cost of its computing infrastructure, is now looking at more flexible software licensing to reduce costs. Quintiles bought TNG Unicentre to administer and support 12,000 PCs in 42 countries, with the major driver the need for year 2000 compliance.

Quintiles has now adopted a scheme under which applications licensed in one country have the licences transferred to a second country, depending on the time difference.

'We already have an agreement for rolling applications licensing with Oracle, based on rolling 1,000 licences globally across time zones. You can't do this without centralised control of your infrastructure,' says Alastair Bradbrook, European project manager.

Bradbrook adds that centralised control not only delivers lower costs but also helps the IT department to deliver a better service to end users.

That's because the IT department controls the applications deployed to desktops, meaning there is less scope for desktops to fail or for downtime through software introduced locally by the end user.

'We aim not just to meet our service level agreements with users but to greatly enhance them,' says Bra brook. 'This goes way beyond the industry debates about whether NT is a cheaper or more expensive platform than Unix. What we want is a much more closely managed environment, including application metering and locked down desktops.'

But framework systems such as TNG are typically priced out of the reach of many small and medium-sized businesses. Such companies have opted for point solutions such as Novadigm's Enterprise Desktop Manager (EDM) to tackle a specific task instead of a whole range of problems.

EDM, used for software distribution and management, keeps a central profile of users' desktop services. When the end user tries to modify something, such as install new software, EDM reverts to the old set-up - this would mean removing the new software installed by the end user.

This reduces an organisation's costs because it avoids the need to send IT staff out to an individual's desktop, and minimises end user downtime.

Another option is to consult a list of IT best practices from consultants such as Summit Management Solutions. Howard Dickel, Summit's managing director, says that users should look at factors such as technology, people and processes to identify distributed computing costs. His aim is to help companies reduce costs by up to 25%, working from a database of about 50 best practices.

'We have seen organisations deploy millions of pounds worth of excellent equipment and not reap any rewards, irrespective of which platform - Windows, Unix, fat client or thin client - because they haven't given sufficient thought as to whether or not they have the processes in place in their organisation to support that technology,' he says.

Meanwhile, the hardware and software vendors are acting to cut PC and Unix running costs.

Compaq has rebranded a series of products and services designed to help users cut their systems costs. Called Life Cycle Management strategy, it includes systems management tools to wake up PCs and download software from the centre. Compaq has also extended the life of support for older PCs, increasing the user's return on investment.

Steve Torbe, Compaq PC product marketing manager, says: 'The problem with TCO these days is that it has been hyped so much that people's eyes roll heavenward if you mention it. However, people may be bored with TCO as a concept, but no organisation can afford to squander money.'

Microsoft is also on the case. With the launch of Windows 2000, its successor to Windows NT, Microsoft expects to make management simpler, and therefore cut costs - through features such as Active Directory, the directory service that allows system managers to control all system resources through a single interface.

Mark Tennant, Windows product marketing manager, adds that existing practices and systems administration tools can reduce the cost of Microsoft-based environments. 'We have shown, for example, that an NT 4 desktop environment can provide about a 35% TCO reduction over a Windows 95 environment, through enabling technologies such as hardware profiling, lock down and zero administration,' says Tennant.

Sun is moving to simplify Unix management. It recently said that its Unix operating system, Solaris, would include native support for web-based enterprise management (WBEM), pushed by the Distributed Management Task Force and backed by Microsoft. Other Unix rivals, including IBM, support the specification only in their enterprise management software.

This should provide a single point of management for Solaris, via the Windows NT interface which also supports WBEM. But whether or not Unix shops are willing to manage such mission-critical systems though Microsoft's relative newcomer remains to be seen.

Research would have us believe if you run a mainframe and you will enjoy lower costs than if you run a PC or even a Unix environment.

But it is not practical for many businesses to install mainframes. Instead, organisations can exploit the principle set by mainframe computing - centralisation - which should lower administration costs and provide greater control over end user's software.

Chris Sarfras, Sun's server product marketing manager, agrees with Xephon's findings but says that large Unix servers will often be more appropriate for many organisations than a large mainframe.

He says: 'The future lies in a return to a centralised data centre, with access coming from every conceivable kind of client.'