I’ve written before about a good experience I had in my past life as a network/IT consultant deploying Wyse thin clients for a small business client with several remote locations spread across the country and a central MS terminal server (”it’s good to be thin“).

A quick update: IBM has just signed a deal to deploy Wyse thin clients running the new Wyse 6.3 operating system to its Global Technology Services clients using VM Ware or Citrix application servers.  One of the improvements in the 6.3 OS: the client is smart enough to recognize CPU-intensive graphics and media, and transfer (and/or cache) data for processing on the local processor: it’s all about identifying which aspects of the application would be most likely to annoy a user if they were delayed by network performance issues (in a way, the new Wyse thin client is getting slightly less thin).

As network performance improves and vendors optimize the hardware for as crisp a user experience as possible, the advantages of thin computing (ease of maintenance, security, and lower power consumption, to name a few) will only become more alluring.  It turned out to be a pretty good idea a few years ago for me, I think it’s even a better idea now.