Thin Client

Source

By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service

March 06, 2006

With an eye toward the U.S. and U.K., IGEL Technology will show off a new line of Windows XP-based thin clients this week at the Cebit conference in Hanover, Germany.

IGEL, based in Bremen, Germany, last December opened a U.K. subsidiary and hopes the new hardware will allow the company to expand outside its continental Europe home base, said Frank Lampe, marketing manager for IGEL.

IGEL has been offering Unix-based terminals since the 1980s, but today is better known for offering Linux and Windows CE 5.0 thin-client technology, he said.

The company saw an opportunity to reach more customers by expanding its thin-client offerings to include systems running Microsoft's XP Embedded (XPe) OS, Lampe said. XPe is a version of Windows XP Professional that is available in different components, designed to let developers decide which features of the OS to embed in a system. "Componentized" OSes are often used in vertical-industry hardware.

"In Germany many people are content with Linux, but in the U.K. and the U.S. many customers are afraid of Linux -- they want standard technology, which to them means Microsoft [software]," he said.

Like IGEL's Linux-based thin clients, the XP offerings will come in Compact, Smart, Winestra, and Premium editions. The IGEL-5512 XP Premium edition shipped in December 2005, and the Compact series of XP clients will be available for customer evaluation at Cebit, Lampe said.

The other editions of XP clients will follow, with the Smart series making its debut by the end of March, he added.

Sales of thin clients rose 46 percent in 2005, according to research firm IDC. That was more than double IDC's projections in 2003 that the market would grow at a rate of 22.8 percent from 2003 until 2007.

IDC currently ranks IGEL fifth in market share among thin-client vendors worldwide, Lampe said. He said the company hopes to gain more market share, particularly in the U.S. and U.K., with the release of the Windows XP thin clients.

Other companies that offer thin clients are Wyse Technology, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell, and Neoware.

In addition to highlighting its new XP thin clients, IGEL also at Cebit plans to announce a new version of its Remote Management Suite, the company's software for managing a network of its thin clients.