Can Wyse Marry Thin Clients and Unified Communications?

Jeff McNaught is the “Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Customer Advocate” at Wyse (No kidding, that’s his title, check it out. In fact, all senior executives at the company have “Chief Customer Advocate” after their titles, an interesting touch. There’s also a “Director of People Development”.)

I always enjoy speaking to Jeff, in no small measure because he seems to truly enjoy evangelizing the Wyse thin client story. Ask him about a competitor and you can tell he’s quietly thanking you for the opportunity to tick off in rapid fire fashion all the reasons why the company’s portfolio is the better than what competitors offer. No ducking, dodging, or equivocation.

Recently I had an chance to talk with him about what I consider to be a fascinating data point: namely that Wyse is working on a project involving thin clients and unified communications (UC), two things you wouldn’t ordinarily associate. Since I spearheaded IDC’s research in this area for several years, any touch points between virtualization and UC tends to get my inner nerd working overtime.

Here’s the deal. Wyse is working with at least three partners on this, all with strong credentials in the space: Cisco, Avaya, and Nortel. Wyse expects to be coming out with a  a SIP-compliant product announcement for non-mobile enterprise deployments next year. McNaught said the company is working much more closely with one of these suppliers but couldn’t provide any additional detail. UC has major momentum in the enterprise these days which means simply that, sooner or later, any supplier in the value chain associated with hosted desktop virtualization market needs to have it on their radar screen. Stay tuned.

Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/25/2008 at 12:49 PM