Prejudiced against the thin

Experts have long touted the benefits of thin-client computing, but experts have also touted the benefits of spirulina and yurts. Only occasionally — yoga comes to mind — does an idea that's good for you catch on.

Wyse's relatively new chief executive, John Kish, believes that the thin era may be upon us. In thin-client computing, the terminal on your desk (or in your pocket disguised as a mobile phone) doesn't compute. Instead, it relays information to and from servers and hard drives that perform all the computation work, Internet surfing and data storage. Thin clients cost less, are easier to manage, and are less susceptible to security breaches, Kish and others say.

On paper, it sounds like a lead-pipe cinch. But what will it take for the idea to catch on? Kish recently hashed over the issue with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com.

Can you give us a quick overview of what's going on at Wyse?
Wyse is a 25-year-old technology company that started here in the valley in '81. We started off making character mode terminals and moved into Windows-based clients in the mid '90s. We actually invented the Windows-based client together with Microsoft and with Citrix, and right now we have about 40 percent market share worldwide.

The centre of gravity [in thin clients] has tended to revolve around a couple of very specific things, chief among them was reliability. There are no moving parts in a thin client. There's no drive, so the mean time between failures is about an order of magnitude greater than you'd find in a PC. Your typical PC has about 15,000 hours between failures; a typical thin client has about 150,000. So people tended to put these in places where they wanted a machine that wouldn't break, like on oil drilling platforms in the North Sea.

Then they sort of started popping up and over. We now account for about 5 percent of all desktops and enterprise worldwide. IDC expects that number to grow to about 10 percent over the next three years. What's interesting is that IDC has noted that the thin-client market itself should grow at about 25 percent annually for the next five years.

A lot of companies have flogged thin clients for years, but they haven't become widespread. What has changed that will make them appealing now?
I think as corporate networks and as networks in general have become faster and faster, it's really becoming very difficult to make the case anymore that a PC is faster than a thin client. Years ago, I think the primary thing that people noticed was latency that occurred between when you wanted the data and when you got it.

Cost is another factor. We see very interesting experiments occurring right now in South America and Africa. If you think about it, the idea here is to provide a cost-effective computing solution. Another advantage for some developing countries is the fact that if you steal [thin clients], they don't do anything. Literally, there was a bank in Kenya that we spoke to that put in a bank of PCs and three months later 80 percent of them were stolen. They then replaced them with thin clients and they lost two.

Look at some of the security problems at the national labs. Imagine...

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