Novell, Wyse Target Thin Clients
Amid deadlines at the office, The VAR Guy didn’t attend Novell’s BrainShare conference this week. But several of his trusted sources are feeding him info from the event. One loyal tipster says Novell is quietly launching a thin client offensive with Wyse Technology. Although The VAR Guy has criticized many of Novell’s recent moves, this thin client approach is super smart.
During a chat with The VAR Guy, newly appointed Wyse CEO Tarkan Maner described how thin clients have, indeed, found a home on millions of corporate desktops. JP Morgan Chase is deploying 50,000 Wyse thin clients. Other true believers include Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, Maner says. In the retail sector, Wal-Mart plans to use 100,000 Wyse thin clients, according to Maner.
Now, imagine if a hefty number of those thin clients ran a specialized version of Novell SuSE Linux. It could happen, folks, thanks to a relationship between Wyse and Novell.
Ironically, Windows Vista’s release may actually drive more customers to thin clients, Maner asserts. “Vista was God’s gift to Wyse,” quips Maner. “When [Vista’s launch] was announced, I was partying at home. I am not exaggerating. I bet it’s a phenomenal OS, but it requires so much memory.”
In The VAR Guy’s mind, that’s Maner’s way of saying: “I don’t want to upset Microsoft but I do want to tell customers there’s a well-managed alternative to those big, expensive, hard-to-manage PCs running Vista.”
Eventually, Wyse and Novell hope to march right into your home. Over the next few months, Maner says, he expects major ISPs and telcos to offer broadband services that come bundled with thin clients for the home. With any luck, Novell certainly hopes, those thin clients will have SuSE Linux inside.
techiq has been a bit hard on novell in recent weeks. good to see the var guy offering some balanced perspective here. i have experience with citrix/wyse. running linux onthe thin client is something that will interest my customers because several of them already have suse on their servers.
Wyse can sell 1 million thin clients. Even if all of them ran SUSE, that would only give Novell another $10 to $30 million in revenue I bet.
Amazingly, there is nothing new here! For years, Novell has offered a thin client solution in the form of Novell Linux Point of Service (NLPOS). NLPOS images were built from Novell Linux Desktop 9 repositories that were setup and maintained separately by integrators. This new offering from Novell is simply the same product released for SLED 10. In my experience, few companies could master NLPOS, including Novell; I suspect we’ll see the same with SLETH (SuSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client).