Thinspace – A New UK-Based Thin Client Supplier

Thinspace Highlights

• Founded in 2006, it has shipped 10k products to date
• Has selected a growing market
• Believes in customising products for customers
• Is promoting thin clients to help lower energy usage in light of the UK government’s recent CRC legislation
• Is a pioneer in mobile thin clients
• Is one of the first British start-up companies in the hardware area for many years

I had the opportunity to meet with Lisa Layzell, CEO (above), and Paul Craddock, Technical Director Thinspace – a new supplier of thin client hardware products. It’s a long time since I spoke to a new British hardware company. It reminded me of my discussions with companies such as Sinclair, Acorn, and ICL many years ago. Many UK hardware companies were killed by globalisation and the scale economies of worldwide coverage. In the modern ITC market I believe companies such as Thinspace can do well as long as they thoroughly understand contract manufacturing and can handle higher prices in the period before they ship hundreds of thousands of machines a year.

Readers of my research will know that I’m looking into all types of client devices – and so it was also good to be able to learn more about how a thin client company operates.

Thinspace’s Thin Client Products

The company was founded in September 2006 and already has signed up 20 resellers, including Insight, Computacenter and SCC. In these early days its operations are based almost entirely in the UK, although it has a single reseller in both Germany and India.

Although it has shipped just 10k products to date, it has an impressive list of customers which includes those in the Health (The NHS, Guys Hospital), Education (Manchester and Liverpool Universities, Kings College) alongside Whitbread, the British Airport Authority in Gatwick, the Prudential in Milton Keynes and others. The betting office company BetFred is replacing its teletext and PCs with Thinspace devices, modernising its shops to show full colour video and graphics.

Its products include thin clients, mobile thin clients (of which it is a pioneer), as well as digital signage products. It uses 6 Far Eastern contract manufacturers and has prices ranging from £177 for the TST200 to £440 for the TDSPC-TV. Its products connect to Windows servers using Citrix, VMWare or Quest enhancements. Many of its machines run CE Windows Embedded standard edition – previously known as XP Embedded, but renamed by Microsoft as Windows 7 takes over from its old brand.

Its Web site includes an interesting TCO calculator, developed by the University of Lancaster and suggests that SMEs can save significantly by moving to a thin client approach. It tells me that even I could save 33% of my costs by moving from my 4 PCs to thin clients, although I doubt whether they could handle my relatively random usage profile!

Customising Hardware Differentiates Thinspace From Its Larger Competitors

Thinspace has some much bigger competitors. Lisa and Paul claim that HP is the key player, which is impressive given the possible cannibalisation of its PC business by selling cheaper thin clients. HP bought Neoware for $241 million back in 2007. My research shows that Wyse – a long-term player of terminals before moving to thin clients – has the most thin client SKUs of any vendor. Other vendors include Sumo, VXL, Igel, Ncomputing and Chip PC. Thinspace believe that its ability to offer customised solutions makes it stand out against its opposition, which have slightly higher prices due to their larger shipment numbers. This is borne out by its customer examples, which are refreshing alongside the generic VDI story many vendors present.

Thin Clients Can Help British Companies Comply With New CRC Legislation

The UK government made the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme part of the law in April 2010. This legislation – previously known as the Carbon Reduction Commitment – now forces 5,000 companies to audit and make reductions in their carbon footprints. I personally think the UK government should have delayed the implementation, as other governments have done – especially since the recession has reduced the world’s carbon emissions by 20% in 2009 in comparison with 2010. In addition the failure of the Copenhagen talks to reach an agreement means that a single country acting on its own is likely to become less productive – something the UK can ill afford to do as its sovereign debt crisis worsens.

Lisa – whose company tag line is ‘Greener, Secure Computing’ – made the point that thin clients use significantly less electricity than PCs, costing around £5 per year, rather than £50. Large companies forced to reduce their carbon footprints should consider thin clients as part of the solution, she argues. I believe, though generically true, large companies should evaluate the extra electricity a server-based approach will take in the data centre before rolling out thin clients everywhere.

Perhaps the British government and its subcontractors should issue mobile thin clients to anyone who needs to access sensitive information, as they can force the use of secure access to remote databases. It would be protected from embarrassing (and sometimes expensive) data losses if such a laptop was lost on a train.

Some Conclusions – Thinspace Has Selected Its Product Area Well

There will be no single winner in the battle between fat and thin clients. In fact the increasing interest in VDI and corporate PC refresh is a tide that will lift all boats, I believe. Thinspace has cleverly selected a product area which looks set to grow, although perhaps more because more organisations need to apply control over their computing, than because of a strong move towards generic PC virtualisation.

I’ve also been talking recently to Intel – who of course has some interesting things to say about the advantages of fat clients. I’m also travelling to Citrix’s annual analyst meeting in Holland this weekend to hear about how close virtual PC experiences can get to the real thing. Learning about desktop replacement and virtualisation is great fun. I believe that the different solutions will fit specific customer needs. Thinspace’s approach to customised hardware allows it to play into turnkey environments, such as BetFred’s. I hope to visit Warrington, where the company is based, sometime in the future and I’m certainly going to enjoy following another UK hardware company.

Do you use thin clients in your organisation? How well do they perform against fat clients? What restriction do users experience? As ever, please let me know by commenting on this post.