Vestby municipality offers over 2000 students and teachers enhanced PC functionality with desktop virtualisation technology

London, United Kingdom – 2nd June 2009, Wyse Technology, the global leader in thin computing, today announced that it has completed installation of over 1,000 zero clients in Vestby municipality, Norway. The new infrastructure is now fully operational and students are regularly using the new thin computing system. In addition to the technological benefits Vestby is also benefitting from reduced power consumption after replacing the existing 650 PCs previously used in the schools.

Vestby local authority, having realised that the existing IT systems at local schools were becoming costly to maintain and impractical to keep up to date, took the decision to invest NOK5 million (£500,000) in new IT infrastructure in 2008. This investment allowed them to significantly widen access to high quality IT for learning and reduce maintenance costs, freeing up budget to invest elsewhere.  The key selection criteria centred on finding a system that could deliver the same quality of access to data and applications as a PC while being low maintenance and future proof.

Teachers in Vestby have been using Wyse thin clients for their own administration and course preparation work since 2003 providing the IT team with direct experience of the robust and simple management of thin client computing. With the wider rollout in schools across the municipality Wyse provided a system that was capable of handling the data, multimedia and application accessibility required by Vestby’s school children.

“The Wyse solution provides each student with a unique personal profile, allowing them to access specific applications and course work online. It also allows them to access their profile from home, making home work more productive.” Lars Peter Lilleng, ICT Manager for Education and a teacher in Vestby commented, “the project has had a great environmental impact as well, in a recent review of power consumption for the municipalities schools it was estimated that the switch to thin computing has delivered an 80% reduction in power usage and cut the annual power costs by over £17,500.”

“This roll out in Norway is part of an ever growing trend in the education sector. As education evolves to meet the needs of today’s students the technology involved has to evolve as well,” states David Angwin, Director of Marketing for EMEA at Wyse. “With standard PC based systems you are faced with ageing desktops, viruses and equipment misuse that can lead to teachers spending more time ‘fire fighting’ than teaching. With Wyse thin computing solutions they have dramatically simplified ICT support and benefit from significant financial savings.”