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September 28, 2006

New Form Factors from Igel

Thin client hardware vendor Igel Technology GmbH has unveiled three new form factors in its portfolio as it prepares to compete more aggressively in the US and UK markets.

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IDC puts the total thin client hardware market at about $820m a year, with 2.85 millions shipped last year. Igel ranks fourth worldwide in its listing by units, behind Wyse, HP, and Neoware. The Bremen, Germany-based company is number one in its home market, and with the backing of its parent, the toys-to-oil and gas conglomerate C Melchers GmbH & Co KG, it has opened offices in the US and UK to build its businesses in those countries.

“The US, UK, and Germany collectively represent about 54% of the world market,” said Stephen Yeo, worldwide strategic marketing director for Igel. “Meanwhile. the UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands make up 60% of the European market, so we have signed up French and Dutch distributors.”

Igel, whose name is an abbreviation of Innovative German Electronics and also means hedgehog in German (see its logo), is clearly coming from behind the big three, all of which are from the US and so are more entrenched in the world’s largest market. To make up for that, Yeo said it seeks to counter in three ways. “First, we have a richer firmware offering, in that we burn software clients for multiple digital services into the Flash on our devices, which means customers don’t have to go buy another piece of hardware if, beyond the standard requirements such as ICA [Citrix], RDP [Microsoft], terminal and emulation and web browser they want to add IPTV or VoIP. The devices ship with a SIP client in the Flash, for instance.”

He said the second differentiator is the fact that Igel enables central console management of “every aspect of the digital services offered, including VoIP settings and Cisco VPN.” He said this differentiates it from its competitors “because with them you have to re-image the Flash on one local device, take a snapshot and then squirt it out to all the others, which at 256GB per device means an overload on the available bandwidth for a lot of networks.”

Finally, there is the breadth of Igel’s portfolio, which it is increasing with the current announcement. Yeo said the company already offers its Smart series of low-end thin clients, the Compact and Winestra series with more processor power and a degree of expandability, and the Premium series with full expandability. Igel had already begun to differentiate itself, however, with conversion card for legacy PCs, with which “you unplug the HDD and put in the IDE cable, then the machine boots from Flash and becomes a thin client,” said Yeo.

Now it has added three more devices, at least two of which Yeo said are unique in the market. First is an integrated 17-inch LCD unit which runs Linux and is called Elegance, with a list price of $959 plus tax, or 829 euros plus tax in Europe.

Next is a ruggedized, portable tablet device called the ProScribe, developed in collaboration with Dutch electronics firm Philips and running XP Embedded, with a list price of $1,649 plus tax in the US and 1,349 euros before tax in Europe. It has a dedicated smart card slot built in it because of the greater prevalence of that technology in Europe, and there is a separate PCMCIA slot into which a cellular data card can be inserted to use that connectivity as an alternative to 802.11 WiFi, which is also in the device.

Finally, there is a multi-screen, fanless box called the PanaVeo, available in Linux and XPE versions, with an integrated Metrox Graphics video card that can output to four displays, with the potential for the same or different windows on each display. This device is available in a two-screen version for $979 plus tax US and 849 euros before tax Europe, as well as the full quad-screen version for $1,549 plus tax US, 1,349 euros before tax in Europe. "This is aimed at places such as trading floors in the financial sector or the accident and emergency rooms in hospitals," said Yeo.

Posted by keefner at September 28, 2006 02:19 PM