Talking with Tarkan Maner, CEO of Wyse
Tarkan Maner, President and CEO of
Wyse, and Jeff McNaught CMO, stopped by our offices in Framingham to chat with
Redmond magazine editor-in-chief Doug Barney, exec. editor Lee Pender and yours truly about the company's future direction. Maner is not your typical CEO in many respects ... I could tell when he and Jeff immediately gravitated towards the
Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots game in our conference room as soon as they arrived.
Tarkan is candid about the industry's blind spots and passionate about his company's value in the marketplace, and conveys both with an animated style. He has the air of someone who knows that the wind is at his back and that his company is at the right place at the right time. He told us that Wyse made a major investment in R&D and now has about 300 R&D employees. They're all working on virtualization software. (The hardware development is outsourced now to Taiwan.)
Another interesting data point: Wal-Mart is a customer with 200,000 thin clients running. "All the stores use thin clients and it used to be PCs 20 years ago. Wal-Mart doesn't do anything without doing extensive internal ROI," he pointed out.
Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/08/2008 at 12:49 PM