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Selling thin to Asia

By Ong Boon Kiat, CNETAsia on June 2, 2005

Summary

newsmaker Thin-client vendor Wyse is big on Asia, having recently moved most of its development work here. CEO John Kish explains the Asian allure and thin-client's next technology frontier.

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newsmaker Wyse's new CEO John Kish was explaining why he thinks the thin-client computing concept will become even thinner.

Thinner, or being able to work with less hardware, because the ex-Oracle and Ashton-Tate man is sure that the next wave of growth for thin-client applications will feature strongly the wireless handheld device market.

"I think," he said as he fished out his mobile phone from his coat to punctuate his point, "[this new mobile thin-client market] will be as large as the phone market, which is a multi-trillion dollar a year market"


Kish on:
Why Asia is hot
 The handheld device market
 A "Flash-less" technology
 Thin-client and open source
The fact that Asia's appetite for new mobile communication and innovation is currently unmatched partly explains why Wyse has embraced Asia in a such big way in the last 12 months. "It takes way too long for US carriers to catch up with this," he said.

The other reason for betting on Asia is Kish's belief that this region's potential for adapting to thin-client technology better than other parts of the world. Thin-client adoption in Asia, he explained, will grow faster than US over the next few years simply because there is a higher level of IT infrastructure building here. "Once you have a powerful network and backend, what you realize is that you don't need a powerful PC on the front-end. And so those companies are now seeing that thin-client model can be a very real alternative," he said.

Thin-client technology--seen mostly on pared-down desktop systems that rely on back-end servers to run their applications--was highly-touted when it first gained prominence as a cheaper alternative to PCs more than a decade ago. A pioneer in its field, Wyse released the industry's first Windows-based thin-client terminal in 1995. Last year, IDC credited the San Jose company with a market-leading share of 37 percent worldwide--in a market worth US$560 million a year--followed by Neoware and Hewlett-Packard.

Last year also saw Wyse nearly emptied out its development operations from US, paring down from about 100 to 25 developers. In the same period, the makers of increased the scale of its Asian development from nearly none to now a staff strength of about 150. "Going to 200 soon," Kish quipped.

"Asia is effectively now our only base for development, because we want to be as close as we can to the next area of growth," he said. The two dozen staff which still ply from San Jose, he was quick to point out, do only co-ordination work, leaving the heavy-lifting product development work largely in the hands of Wyse's 100-developer strong Bangalore branch and its three month-old, 30-man Beijing center.

But if the dizzying growth figures projected by analysts for Asia excite the man who boasts a Ph.D. in Mathematical Logics from the Johns Hopkins University, Kish is bullish also because he believes Wyse holds this market's next trump card: A thin-client technology that can work without Flash memory.

In Singapore last month to "check on Wyse's Asian investments", Kish spoke to CNETAsia about Wyse's new software architecture, and its plans to operate in Asia in the coming months.

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