Nov. 4, 2009 (Business Wire) -- Wyse Technology, the global leader in thin computing and client virtualization, today announced another success story at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri.

Founded by the Jesuits in 1910, Rockhurst University is a comprehensive university that offers more than 50 undergraduate and graduate programs taught by nationally-recognized faculty. Rockhurst has been ranked among the top masters’ universities in the Midwestern United States by U.S. News & World Report, and has several times been singled out by the Carnegie Foundation for its excellence in teaching. This track record of innovative teaching is matched by a tradition of innovation in IT. Rockhurst has been ranked among the nation's top 30 wireless college campuses by Intel. The university recently switched from PCs in its student labs to thin client devices from Wyse Technology.

"We wanted to provide our students and faculty excellent computing services while cutting the costs of maintaining PCs and conserving energy," says Michael Stanclift, Network Analyst at Rockhurst. "We believed that thin clients could be the solution on both economic and environmental fronts."

Prior to the introduction of Wyse virtual clients, Rockhurst typically replaced half of its PCs in one year, half the next, and then repeated the cycle. Each of these two cycles would take 75% of its IT budget for that year. This frequent replacement of PCs — and day-to-day maintenance, support, and repairs — consumed too much IT staff time and too large a share of the university's IT budget, leaving little scope for future innovation. The IT team was eager to consider options; especially any that would contribute to the university's efforts to minimize its carbon footprint.

"We started to think about virtualizing our desktop machines after we implemented VMware ESX and saw the benefits of virtualization within our server environment," added Stanclift. Timelines were tight, however. To minimize the impact on students, the Rockhurst IT team would have to complete the entire project — switching out PCs and replacing them with thin-client devices and a VDI on the back end — all during a 12-week summer vacation period.

"We considered switching only a few labs to thin clients to start," commented Stanclift. "We ultimately decided that from a financial standpoint and in the spirit of keeping standardization in the labs, we would take the leap and replace them all at one time. We knew that thin clients could save us in hardware costs, refresh, installation, and energy.