Dell Brings Wyse Into Commercial Client Group with Revamped Hardware

Dell Technologies plans to roll out new midrange thin client computing hardware next month, signaling a significant shift in the way the company builds and delivers its Wyse VDI hardware.

The new Dell Wyse Thin Client 5070, launched earlier this month at Dell Technologies World, is the first designed and manufactured by the company’s commercial PC division, offering a common VDI hardware design available in 1,600 different configuration options.

“Our brand new 5070 was designed with Dell’s supply chain, intellectual property,” said Jeff McNaught, vice president of marketing for Dell Cloud Client Computing. “These represent a quantum leap now in the flexibility and performance of thin clients.”  

Jeff McNaught

Jeff McNaught

The new thin-client hardware is scheduled to ship to partners June 5 and will be available with quad-core Intel Celeron or higher-end Pentium processors and can be ordered with two, three or six ports, each supporting 4K 60Hz UHD displays. The hardware will offer three networking options – including dual-band wireless – and two RJ45 LAN ports, eight USB ports – including a Type-C port – and a variety of legacy interfaces including parallel and serial ports. In addition to supporting Wyse ThinOS, the new hardware can run Wyse ThinLinux client software and eventually will be available with Windows 10 IoT.

“What I like about the Wyse 5070 is it consolidates six different models that they have in there, and while that may sound like it’s to Dell’s benefit, it also benefits partners and customers because they have a single, configurable solution,” said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst with Moor Insights and Strategies.

Moving Wyse into the Dell commercial PC group doesn’t portend a move away from the Wyse brand, said McNaught.

“Wyse is a brand just like the Latitude, OptiPlex or Precision brands,” he said. “Whenever you see the Wyse brand at Dell, it’s all about digital workspaces, VDI and in-essence virtualization.”

Since acquiring Wyse in 2012, Dell has steered away from integrating it with its PC organization, though the two groups had increasingly worked more closely together in recent years, sharing design, engineering and go-to-market efforts. Dell officially integrated Wyse into the commercial client division led by senior VP Darrel Ward last month, said Kelli Hodges, global marketing manager for Dell’s commercial client group.

“Now we have the big engine behind them, where they were kind of a small organization a big ship,” she said.

McNaught, who joined Wyse in 1987, is credited with developing its VDI terminal released in 1995. The new Wyse clients will support multiple deployment options and represent the latest effort to extend its new VDI Complete offering.

Launched a year ago, VDI Complete provides turnkey virtual desktop solutions as a subscription-based service with monthly per user pricing. VDI Complete brings together a variety of client options including Dell Wyse VDI terminals, VMware’s Horizon endpoint management suite and Dell EMC’s data-center infrastructure. McNaught described the new 5070 systems as an important piece of new VDI Complete offering.

Dell EMC has also added new data-center hardware for VDI Complete, including the company’s latest PowerEdge 14th generation services configured with its VxRail and vSAN Ready Nodes. Also available with the VDI Complete offering are NVIDIA’s Quadro virtual Data Center Workstation (Quadro vDWS) software and its Tesla P40 GPUs for workstation-capable workloads. In addition to the new Wyse 5070 VDI clients, the service will work with the OptiPlex PC line.

“The great thing about the new offerings is partners can resell VDI Complete, but if they want to pull together a solution on their own, maybe looking [to use] Citrix, or something like that, or even Windows, you can pull together your own solution.”