NComputing Turns To Microsoft For New Co-Chair
Poole, who most recently was a corporate vice president in Microsoft's Unlimited Potential Group and previously headed Microsoft's Windows Client Business, joins NComputing CEO Stephen Dukker at the top of the food chain at the rapidly-growing thin-client software and hardware developer.
"I'm really excited to join up. This is a company that for many people has come out of nowhere with a new spin on an old idea, and in all my travels around the world, the need for low-cost computing has never been more evident," Poole told ChannelWeb.
NComputing offers two main desktop virtualization installations. The X-Series installation, featuring a $350-$400 central PC that powers up to seven thin-client displays, is especially popular in educational settings and for small, centrally-located workgroup clusters in business environments, Dukker said.
The L-Series offering is built around central PCs in the $1,000 range, each of which handles workloads for 30 or more users. Because users are connected to the central computer via an Ethernet LAN, NComputing's L-Series fits the needs of larger workplaces and campuses with users situated more than 30 feet from each other.
Each product line has accounted for roughly half of NComputing's shipments in achieving 1 million unit sales, Drukker said.
Since bursting onto the high-tech scene at the Fall 2006 Demo show, NComputing has gone on to win numerous industry achievement awards and pick up a steady stream of large contracts around the world with an emphasis on educational installations.
NComputing does a healthy portion of its business through reseller channels, including doing "somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 percent" of worldwide sales through whitebox system integrators.
"At the same time, virtually all of the major PC companies have us in the mix. We're on Dell's website, for example. You can have an NComputing installation configured by Dell," he said.
Poole, whose name, incidentally, comes up in ChannelWeb's investigations into Microsoft's Vista Capable lawsuit, said NComputing hopes to develop its distribution channels even further.
"NComputing has an elegant technology that will have a broad range of versatility. The fact that desktop processors continue to scale out is great for NComputing and one of our key strategies is to develop a very strong dealer channel worldwide," Poole said.