Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, today announced that millions of students worldwide went back to school without PCs -- happily. Increasingly, education institutions around the world are benefitting from lower total cost of ownership, improved reliability, simplified management, and enhanced security of Wyse devices and software. Wyse welcomes these users back to school with a broad array of solutions to meet the needs of schools large and small.

"Over the past three years, the U.S. education system -- from K-12 to higher education -- has faced relentless budget cuts, forcing administrators to seek ways to substantially reduce expenses, including system-wide IT costs. We are doing our students a disservice by misappropriating limited funds to a vicious, inefficient cycle of PC replacement," said Tarkan Maner, President and CEO of Wyse Technology. "For that reason we congratulate education customers that have leveraged a data center computing model that leverages powerful and inexpensive cloud-client desktops and mobile devices. As a critical sector in our society, K-12 and higher education can reap tremendous benefits from the adoption of desktop virtualization and the data center cloud computing model."

Rather than using traditional dispersed and fragmented PCs, these schools have implemented a data center model providing a secure, unified, centralized repository leveraging powerful virtualization software. The virtualized server is integrated with software and devices from Wyse, using a cloud client approach providing end users with improved access to their critical applications. Notwithstanding a consistent deployment philosophy, each of the following schools had different requirements, infrastructure issues, and therefore deployed a wide variety of Wyse solutions.

Sullivan University System, Kentucky's largest private post-secondary institution, offers more than 8,500 students higher education ranging from certificates and diplomas to advanced degrees. Sullivan's IT group takes responsibility for ensuring that students and teachers in its labs and classrooms at all six campuses have access to the applications and computing resources they need to support instruction. It also provides the school's administrators with the mission-critical applications that help keep the school running. Following an implementation of Citrix XenDesktop, Sullivan decided to extend virtualization to the desktop. They recently made the move to Wyse Xenith, the best-selling zero client for Citrix, deploying 300 devices to date to centrally manage and deploy more than 80 applications; everything from accounting applications to culinary demonstrations.

"IT is central to the mission of the school," says Mike Grosse, CTO of Sullivan. "But like so many universities, we're feeling the economic crunch. We're constantly being challenged to provide state-of-the-art resources at bargain-basement prices. I didn't want to have to think about the endpoint device at all. The Wyse Xenith zero client was the missing piece that enabled us to move wholly to the virtual desktop model. And the results have been everything I'd hoped for."

The municipality of Gjesdal, a mountain district on the west coast of Norway, has one of Norway's youngest populations. As such, the municipality has a strong focus on the well-being of children and their educational environment. To that end, the municipality has recently deployed a solution centered on Wyse WSM cloud PC server software encompassing approximately 750 seats. When VDI isn't an option, schools such as those in Gjesdal look to put computing devices in the hands of students and teachers in cloud-based model. Wyse WSM is the powerful solution running on Gjesdal's servers to deliver a true PC experience, with improved security and manageability to repurposed, diskless PCs, cloud PC desktops and VDI virtual machines throughout the campus. As part of its new implementation, the IT team at Gjesdal unleashed dozens of its teenage students to perform a one-hour stress test. The students ran 120 clients simultaneously, including checklist items, streaming a great deal of multimedia, and lots of multitasking. All of it performed perfectly without any interruptions.

"This was one of the more interesting stress-tests I've been involved in before, but there's no substitute for having tech-savvy teenagers take the Wyse WSM solution for a test drive," according to Atle Lovdal, IT Consultant at EDB Ergogroup working with Gjesdal. "In fact the IT manager at Gjesdal was so satisfied with the performance that he bought us a cake!"

There's only one gold LEED-certified academic building in the state of Nebraska: Mammel Hall, the new College of Business Administration (CBA) facility on the Omaha campus of the University of Nebraska. Today Mammel Hall serves as the center for 2,500 students in the CBA: 2,100 in undergraduate programs, and the remainder studying for graduate degrees. When the design process for the building began in 2008, energy-efficiency and LEED certification were high on the list of goals. Not only does Mammel Hall now boast state of the art energy-efficient dual-screen thin clients from Wyse with VMware on the back end, the minimal upkeep required of these devices enabled them to deploy even more devices than originally planned. The building now has 230 devices supporting its students.

"I honestly believe that a full transition to thin clients is the only way to go, especially for organizations that want to cut costs, save energy and human resources, and increase productivity all at the same time," according to David Nielsen, Director of Technology and Budget and Building Manager, College of Business Administration at University of Nebraska at Omaha. "Wyse thin clients enabled us to meet all these requirements -- and provide a valuable lesson for our students that you don't have to compromise performance for sustainability. In fact, the opposite -- with Wyse, we've shown that the best choice for sustainability can be the best choice -- period."

Citrus Community College in Glendora, California provides educational opportunities to a varied student body -- those that are working toward a two-year degree, those that are seeking to augment their education and those that combine work and study together. Computers are invaluable on campus for students to use after classes or on projects. To meet student needs, the on-campus computer infrastructure must be reliable, scalable and easy to maintain on a minimal staff. Leigh Buchwald, Network Central Computing & Telecommunication Systems Supervisor, saw virtualization as the future of computing and began to virtualize the college's math, nursing and science labs through a combination of VMware and Wyse software and Wyse client devices. As a result of this and other green projects on the campus, the college was awarded the 2010 Green Campus Award at the Green California Community College Summit.

"While desktop virtualization has met our near-term goals of reducing maintenance and saving energy, our school and our IT system have our eyes set on the future -- distance education," according to Leigh Buchwald, Network Central Computing & Telecommunication Systems Supervisor at Citrus Community College in Glendora, CA. "We are looking closely at how virtualization fits into a distance education strategy and how students will be able to access a remote desktop from wherever -- class, lab, library or home -- and access the specialized software and applications needed to complete coursework."

Imagine that your company's headcount grew by 54% and that you had to build 11 new offices? Now, imagine that your IT staff hasn't grown, or worse, has shrunk? And, that your 17,259 tech users range in age from 5-18 years old and share computers. This is precisely the scenario at Oswego Community Unit School District in Oswego, Illinois. Despite those circumstances, Oswego is transforming its computing infrastructure and has become a model not just in education but for enterprises as well. The IT team has moved the organization's 22 buildings to cloud client computing with server and desktop virtualization and is creating a sustainable computing infrastructure that allows users to gain remote access and bring their own devices.

"We have virtualized our entire educational infrastructure by replacing PCs with thin and zero clients; expanding them into the classroom where computers did not previously exist. The end result is a massive expansion of learning time for students. Gone are the long boot and login times. Now, 95% of the time a student spends in the computer lab is productively focused on learning activities. All this, even while maintaining an IT to end user ratio of 1,000 to 1," according to Allen Clasen, Director of Information Systems, Oswego Community Unit School District. "We've been able to avoid millions of dollars in PC replacement costs, and enhance staff skill sets by moving to a virtualized environment combining Dell servers and EMC storage running Citrix and VMWare with Wyse thin and zero client devices."

Another Wyse Xenith user, Sycamore Community School District in Illinois needed to better manage its servers, applications and desktops as the district experiences growth in enrollment. The district turned to virtualization and experienced a huge success in server and application management. Out of that success, grew the desire to expand virtualization to the desktop.

"The nice thing about what we've done in terms of management is that we no longer have eight different people troubleshooting issues on the desktop. Now we have one person do so and in a timely manner," said Sean Larson, Network Administrator, at Sycamore Community Schools. "Because troubleshooting is done offsite, classrooms are no longer disrupted and teachers are able to use their time more efficiently."

More information on how Wyse is transforming technology in the education sector can be found at http://www.wyse.com/solutions/education