Pano Logic, the leader in virtual desktops, today announced a joint webinar with T.H.E. Journal. The webinar will be presented by Mark Lamson, director of technology for the Westerly Public School District, and will review what led the school district to consider a virtual desktop solution and the drivers for their selection and deployment of the Pano System^TM. The webinar will be held on July 29, 2009, at 2 p.m. Eastern / 11 a.m. Pacific and will be available until October 28. Registration can be found at www.panologic.com/thejournal.

“As traditional PCs reach the end of their lifecycle, desktop virtualization is an ideal way for K-12 schools to leverage their existing resources while providing students with access to the learning tools made possible by personal computing,” said Bryan Cox, executive vice president, worldwide field operations, Pano Logic. “This webinar will review common PC issues that can be found in K-12 schools and provide a real-world case study that illustrates how schools can save on desktop acquisition and management costs, reduce time spent managing desktops, improve security and, most importantly, repurpose existing resources like older classrooms and server infrastructure.”

The Westerly Public School District in Rhode Island is a progressive K-12 school system with a total of seven schools – five elementary, one middle school and one high school – serving more than 3,300 students and employing over 700 staff members, only five of whom work in IT. The school district IT staff supports from one to five desktop PCs in every classroom, as well as computer labs throughout the district. Faced with supporting large numbers of aging desktop computers and needing to setup new computer labs despite limitations in the physical space and electrical infrastructure of the district’s older buildings, Westerly began looking for a solution to these issues.

When initially deployed by the school district in September 2008, the Pano System quickly met Westerly’s needs, enabling the IT staff to transform older classrooms into computer labs, since the compact Pano Devices easily fit on desktops and run on as little as 3% of the electricity needed to power traditional PCs. In addition, Westerly has also been able to improve security and reduce time spent supporting desktops by centralizing desktop management in the data center. Lamson expects to see the Pano Devices pay for themselves in just three years just based on the cost of the energy saved. This not only let the school district make the most of their existing virtualization infrastructure and IT budget but also helped ensure that students and staff got access to the computers they needed.

“Pano Logic addressed many of our most important needs simultaneously,” said Lamson. “When selecting a desktop virtualization solution, I wanted to leverage the success and cost of our underlying VMware infrastructure investment in order to do more with less and best serve our student and staff needs. From the greening of the desktop to securing desktop data to having no moving parts, the zero-client Pano System has met our needs and offers a strong ROI from a management and efficiency standpoint.”

For more information about the Pano Logic webinar with T.H.E. Journal, visit www.panologic.com/who-we-are/events.php.