Both quit their jobs at Dazel, an Austin-based designer of client-server software, to start their own Internet software firm.

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In high school, Maples started writing video games for PCs and then went to Stanford where his room-mate was Joe Liemandt, who founded client-server software maker, Trilogy Software, in Austin.

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The Chicago-based company sells both client and server versions of its VoiceCheck software to companies who then implement their own systems.

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Instead of one PC client hosted on one server, virtualization software allows companies to host many PCs on a single server, cutting total IT energy costs.

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We use Windows Terminal Server as a thin client to operate our three main software applications: Microsoft Office, QuickBooks and GoldMine, a customer relationship management program.

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Worse, software is moving away from data centers in client-server configurations tied to PCs.

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When Salesforce.com signs up a new client, it simply creates an account on the software platform that ties together its farms of server-computers.

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Both consisted of two parts, a client component running on the Cisco 819 router designed to handle machine to machine (M2M) communications and server based software which handles various tasks, such as data analytics.

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