As Citrix gears up to deliver its virtual machine as a service platform it might well be worth thinking about the implications that virtual machine technology is likely to have on long maligned thin clients.
There are a lot more thin clients out there than most people suspect but for the most part thin clients have been looked down upon because they didn't offer the same level of functionality as a PC.
But as a soft economy raises interest in lowering the total cost of computing, Wyse Technology is betting that thin clients that come embedded with virtual machine software will change the way people think about deploying thin clients versus PCs.
Jeff McNaught, the chief marketing officer for Wyse, says that most people don't realize that thin clients today can now run multiple screens, sport a of full range of graphics and video capabilities and support a full range of peripherals through Universal Series Bus (USB) connectors.
What's been missing, he argues, is a line of think clients that support virtualization, which in turn should significantly expand the number of server applications that think clients can interact with via Citrix XenApp presentation server technology. Previously, the number of applications that thin clients could work with was limited but with the advent of virtualization thin clients can now be used with basically any application. To quote McNaught, this means that the application logjam that had been limiting the adoption of thin clients is now eliminated.
Wyse will be shipping a new line of Viance thin clients and related mobile devices next month as part of its alliance with Citrix. What remains to be seen is whether virtualization will really change the way people think and feel about thin clients. Right now, Dell and Lenovo are reselling thin clients from Wyse. But Hewlett-Packard last year bought NeoWare so it remains to be seen how much weight HP will put behind thin clients.
According to McNaught, thin clients are one of those counter cyclical technologies that tend to sell well during hard times. We're not exactly sure how hard these times are going to be and for how long, but with the advent of virtualization it looks like the time of thin clients may be coming again.