California Schools Turn to the "Three Rs of Education IT" with Wyse Thin Clients

Client Virtualization Initiatives Allow Districts to Do More With Less

SAN JOSE, Calif. – 06/10/2009 - Wyse Technology, the global leader in thin computing and client virtualization, today announced successful implementations at two California school districts, the Clovis Unified School District in Clovis, in California's San Joaquin Valley, as well as the River Delta Unified School District, located south of Sacramento.  Through the introduction of Wyse thin clients, Clovis Unified and River Delta are finding ways to leverage limited funds while still expanding technology services.  The success of these implementations fall under the heading of the "Three Rs of Education IT" --reliability, replacement costs, and remote management.

In California and across the country, there is a growing recognition of the importance of integrating technology into day-to-day instruction.  Studies have reported that students who used computer-based instruction score 14% higher on achievement tests than students without computers.  Students also learn more in less time when receiving computer-based instruction, and even enjoy their classes more.   At the same time, districts everywhere are struggling with a combination of aging and troublesome PC infrastructures and a budgetary situation that can charitably be described as problematic.  Centralized applications and services running on thin clients turned out to be the best solution for both school districts.  "We know that our charter is to get as many computers in as many kids' hands as possible as often as they need them," according to Dan Resciniti, Clovis Unified's Chief Technology Officer.  "But there was a very large gap between the problem and the solution.  Fortunately, we are well on the path to achieving our goals through the implementation of Wyse thin clients."

Every school district in the country is trying to do more with less, so simplicity and efficiency are top on the agendas of most educational IT experts.   With Wyse thin clients, Clovis Unified and River Delta are benefitting on three fronts:

Reliability: When computers are malfunctioning, students don’t learn.  Virus, patch management, and download issues are complicated enough in PCs, but when those devices are shared among many users, these complexities significantly increase.  Furthermore, as PCs degrade over time, they have lower performance and require more upkeep.  With thin client, students can't really do them any harm.  Even theft isn't a concern.  If a thin client is stolen, it has no hard drive and therefore no valuable information on the device.

"Prior to our embracing a thin client platform, our district focused on repair and maintenance," according to Robert Hubbell, Chief Education Services Officer for the River Delta Unified School District.  "Now our focus is on using our computer labs as learning environments.  This is a very exciting journey and our challenges have been as rewarding as our success.  We believe that by using shared services and infrastructure, the synergy created will deliver a better quality of education services for our students through technology.  We are even using complex, video-streaming applications with our students, and the reliability of the thin clients has never been in doubt."

Replacement Costs:  The standard 3-5 year lifecycle of a personal computer is difficult to attain in a shared environment such as a computer lab.  In addition, today's educational budgets simply don't support the replacement costs on the same time-frames as a typical PC lifecycle.  Increasingly, businesses and schools alike are struggling with the long-term economics of a PC environment.  "It turns into a vicious cycle," according to Maniscalco.  "With PCs, we wind up working with temperamental, high-maintenance computers.  With thin clients, I can swap computers in and out in very little time; plus I expect the Wyse devices to last much longer."

Cost is also a factor with respect to Green IT and overall energy savings.  Because thin clients use 90% less energy than personal computers, school districts are finding some budget relief by lowering their energy bills.  "I'd be lying if I said the main motivation to move to Wyse thin clients was energy efficiency," added Hubbell, "but we have reduced the District's carbon footprint and lowered our energy bill.  That's the kind of information I'm happy to pass on to our students and greater community."

Remote Management: While remote management capabilities exist for PCs, the improvement with thin clients is substantial.   With thin clients, however, every computer can be managed remotely and updated simultaneously.  "Our teachers love it, because one change can be replicated immediately," added Maniscalco.  "The IT team loves it because the remote management capabilities are so much more efficient and less time-consuming.  Believe it or not, we now have a single IT person responsible for all of our computer labs.  Prior to our thin client implementation, this would have been impossible."   

River Delta had unique remote management challenges because the district encompasses 10 relatively disbursed school sites, with an overall student population of approximately 2,000 students.  The District couldn't justify the economics of PC maintenance over this wide an area, and was struggling with expensive outside vendors to handle PC issues.  According to Christy Ricketts, Technology Support Coordinator at River Delta, "Having Wyse thin clients in place gave us the means to build efficient and cost-effective computer labs in all of our schools, which still consolidating all of the lab servers at a central location.  The idea of having a Remote Desktop Protocol that can run 200 virtual desktops on a single server platform instead of 200 individualized PC’s running our tech support program is very exciting, and insanely efficient."

"Wyse continues to have a great deal of success in areas such as healthcare, retail, government and more, but there is a company-wide excitement about our ability to improve the quality of a child's education," according to Maryam Alexandrian, Senior Vice President Worldwide Sales and Channels at Wyse Technology.  "Imagine the geography lessons from your childhood where the most sophisticated technology was a multi-colored map and a pointer.  Now imagine that same lesson being taught via Wyse thin clients running Google Earth and you can begin to understand how excited we are to help play a role in making that possible."

Wyse Technology will be demonstrating its education solutions at NECC, the National Educational Computing Conference, from June 28 to July 1, in Washington, DC.

About Wyse Technology

Wyse Technology is the global leader in thin computing-based virtualization software and hardware solutions. Wyse and its strategic partners, including, Citrix®, CSC®, IBM®, Lenovo®, Microsoft®, Novell®, VMware® and others deliver the most innovative hardware, software, and services that optimize the benefits of cloud computing, virtualization and green IT. These thin computing solutions allow consumers, SMEs and large public and private enterprises to access high definition voice, data and video content they need, with optimized security, manageability, and user experience at a much lower total cost of ownership than other traditional end user devices, including PCs. Wyse has the largest global distribution network in the thin computing market through its partners and offices worldwide. Wyse was founded in 1981, and it is headquartered in San Jose, California, USA.

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