I recently spoke with John Kish, CEO of Wyse, a leader in thin client/thin computing systems. Wyse is also one of the companies relaunched by Garnett & Helfrich Capital, a private equity firm specializing in venture buyouts.

Wyse is in the sweet spot of the move away from fat, loaded PCs, towards very thin, high performance clients running Windows applications on a server.

With Wyse's technology combined with those from partners Citrix and VMware, users feel they are working on a high performance Windows XP PC. John Kish, CEO of Wyse, notes that this type of thin computing system offers many traditional customers of PCs significant advantages.

For example, in the corporate world the PC is a large problem. It is a target for spyware and viruses, it often contains sensisitive data about customers, and it is expensive to buy and maintain.

"The beauty of thin computing is that the client offers the same functionality as a PC but if you disconnect it from its network, it is useless, it contains no data, it becomes as useful as a doorstop," says Mr Kish.

A key difference with Wyse's solution is that it produces a client that has no flash memory, and doesn't require an X86 microprocessor. And later this summer, Wyse will announce a single-chip thin client solution along with an as yet unnamed chip maker.

With a single chip solution it can be embedded into a monitor, a keyboard, anything electronic with a network connection. Just add some DRAM and connect to a thin computing system and you have a centrally managed, high performance system that is secure from outside threats.

Mr Kish says that corporations are very interested in such solutions, especially in Japan where there are new laws that threaten company executives with jail time if sensitive customer data is exposed. "With our thin computing systems, there is no data on the local client, there is nothing to expose," he says.

With regulations such as Europe's data privacy laws, which control the use of customer data outside of Europe, a solution such as this means overseas operators can work with customer data because only the "picture" of the screen is transmitted.

The Wyse single chip solution is very inexpensive. It will use a low power consuming microprocessor design from the British company ARM, using six cores and optimized to render video, sound and graphics. Wyse has demonstrated a prototype version running 32 video streams simultaneously.

Corporations like the security of thin computing but they love the lower cost of managing thousands of PCs. With Wyse's software maintaining thousands of PC users is easily done from a single location, says Mr Kish.

Educational uses are also very attractive. Instead of having PCs in the classroom, and setting up each one for different applications, thin computing means lesson plans and applications can be loaded from one central location in minutes. And users cannot install or download potentially dangerous software.

In developing countries, thin computing solutions offer lower costs. And even in the home, thin computing is a better solution than having multiple PCs networked around the house.

Mr Kish says that Dell, HP, and others are moving towards thin computing solutions, realizing the growing demand. The potential losers in this shift of computing architectures are the white box manufacturers. These are small, local businesses that assemble PCs from off-the-shelf components.

Wyse, might seem like a hardware company, but under Mr Kish, it is rapidly moving towards being a software company. "We have technologies that we are developing that we will license to others," he says. That includes the single-chip solution which will be available to other manufacturers.

Mr Kish is no stranger to the ideas of thin computing. He worked with Terry Garnett, of Garnett & Helfrich Capital at Oracle in the early 1990s on early thin client systems. In those days, the technologies weren't there to provide a full featured PC user experience. Thin client systems developed a reputation for poor performance

But much has changed over the past ten years, we now have inexpensive high speed networks and a host of software and hardware technologies that easily enable a high quality user experience, says Mr Kish.

Getting Wyse to this point was not easy for Garnett & Helfrich Capital, which has an 80 percent stake in the company. Wyse, founded in 1981, was publicly traded in Taiwan, which meant taking it private and then carving out the part of the company that concentrated on thin computing, then recruiting the new management teams, and setting up the technology licensing pacts with partners.

Mr Kish says the most immediate business opportunities are in Asia, followed by Europe and then North America. Tiis is mainly to do with the lack of large legacy infrastructures in Asia, and European demand for lower cost computing.

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