John Kish wants it all. The CEO of San Jose, Calif.-based Wyse Technology
doesn’t see thin clients as a niche, or a poor cousin to the PC, but rather its
inevitable desktop successor.
“Most corporations have been able to move 60 to 70 percent of their
desktop applications to servers, but a large number have
not migrated maybe because the applications were written for the PC,” Kish
told internetnews.com.
To that end, Wyse announced an alliance with virtualization software maker VMware this week that Kish
said will eventually help the company get most, if not all, PC applications
over to servers where they can be readily accessed by low cost, desktop thin clients.
Wyse will join the VMware Community Source program. It plans to
integrate its Wyse infrastructure deployment and management solutions with
VMware’s virtual infrastructure, across its thin-client platform portfolio,
which includes Windows XPe, Windows CE, Wyse Thin OS and Linux.
Kish said there will be additional announcements in the next few months, as
the two companies work at a more technical level to integrate VMware’s
software and Wyse’s thin-client OS.
“I think what this will do is open up the PC replacement market,” said
Kish. “PCs are basically swapped out every three years and a lot of IT
managers are asking why. If we can deliver a thin client with the same
usability, the economic argument for CIOs is easy to make.”
Wyse also plans to eventually take the thin-client model well beyond the
traditional PC box replacement. Later this year Kish said Wyse plans to
unveil its first single-chip implementation of a thin client that could
theoretically be embedded in cell phones and PDAs.
Wyse also struck a deal with AT&T’s business services division this week
that will see the telecom giant resell Wyse’s line of thin clients.
“We’re the largest backbone and Internet provider and we’ve had a lot of
requests for thin-client solutions,” Art Gough, field technical marketing general manager at AT&T Business Services, told internetnews.com.
“Customers are
telling us they want Wyse, and they’re the market leader so it was an easy
decision.”
Gough said AT&T’s direct sales force has already been selling Wyse’s complete
product line of software, hardware, and services bundled with its own global
data and IP network, security and continuity services, and data-hosting
services.
“We see tremendous opportunity to expand our footprint with existing
customers but also significantly expand the overall market in replacing PCs
with the help of AT&T,” said Kish.
