Dell's Buyout of Wyse: Really a Cloud Computing Move?

By samdizzy

Dell Wyse Cloud Client

I don’t have a clear answer to that question but Talkin’ Cloud does have some educated guesses.

In the vast majority of deployments, I suspect Wyse’s thin clients are connected to private corporate servers rather than cloud-related servers.

Privately held Wyse has worked hard in recent years to push beyond the traditional thin client market, which often involved niche deployments in retail, manufacturing and health care settings. Those customer settings can be lucrative for Wyse and its 3,000 channel partners. But Wyse often got overshadowed by traditional low-cost PCs.

To strengthen its story, Wyse began marketing itself for VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), desktop virtualization and cloud client deployments. The idea was to move virtually all of the intelligence up to a secure server — in some cases, a public or private cloud server — while minimizing client management costs.

Apparently, the strategy caught Dell’s attention. In a prepared statement today, Dell said Wyse’s technology portfolio has high attach rates to data center solutions such as servers, networking, storage and services.

Translation: Dell plans to connect the dots between Wyse and its other recent acquisitions. Plus, I suspect Dell PartnerDirect channel partners will potentially plug Wyse into their cloud services product portfolios.

I still don’t think of Wyse as a cloud computing-oriented company. In some ways I’m stuck with my old perceptions of Wyse as a thin client company. But that’s okay. Wyse continues to garner a lot of respect in that niche. And Wyse CEO Tarkan Maner did manage to build some buzz around the “cloud client” term.

Enough buzz, in fact, to bring Dell to the negotiating table.