New York-based Healthcare Leader Turns to Wyse and VMware View™ to Deliver Secure Patient Care and Meet HIPAA Regulations at Lower TCO

Interfaith Medical Center Virtually Eliminates Tech Support Costs via Wyse Cloud Client Computing Solutions

SAN JOSE, Calif. – 08/31/2010 - Today at VMworld 2010, Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, today announced how its customer, Interfaith Medical Center, has begun the transition away from PCs in favor of Wyse thin clients.  Interfaith, a multi-site community teaching healthcare system that provides a wide range of medical services throughout Brooklyn, New York, operates a newly-modernized hospital and 16 clinics, serving more than 250,000 patients every year.  Squeezed by a combination of rising costs and declining reimbursements, Interfaith looked for tools that would help it continue to deliver excellent care while reducing administrative costs.

In a concerted effort to improve patient care and staff productivity by upgrading its IT system, Interfaith undertook an ambitious transition to all-electronic medical records management adopting the MEDITECH electronic medical records application both to improve its own productivity and to comply with government requirements.  The Interfaith IT team saw MEDITECH training as an opportunity to begin the transition away from PCs toward virtual desktops.  With the assistance of Tech Access Corporation, a regional Wyse reseller, they decided to implement Wyse thin clients to train healthcare workers.  The team set up four training labs, each with 15 desktop workstations, rotating all staff through a multi-day training course.

Instead of spending weeks setting up PCs, the team had Wyse thin clients up and running in two days. On the backend were IBM servers running VMware View™ provisioning the MEDITECH application over the network.  VMware View™ is a complete, virtual desktop solution that enables enterprises to improve security, lower operating costs, and simplify desktop administration and management by establishing a modern, end-user computing architecture.

"We turned to thin clients because we needed greater ease of updates and installation than PCs could offer," according to Meraz Nasir, Manager of Infrastructure at Interfaith.  "We can't have doctors and nurses show up for training and then waste their time because of PC issues.  We needed peak performance, all the time, in order to meet our ambitious training and implementation schedules.  We also wanted to use the training labs to prepare ourselves for deployment of thin clients throughout our organization, to provide greater reliability and maintenance savings as well as greater security to help us meet our HIPAA obligations."

The savings began right away: PCs cost about $1,100 each, while popular Wyse thin clients cost less than $250 with plug and play setup and virtually zero management.  Once implemented, thin clients save money every day by using less than 7 watts — a fraction of the 180 Watts or so that PCs demand.  In power savings alone, the thin client will pay for itself in about 3 years.

"A normal PC refresh cycle is 3 to 5 years but in the budget-conscious healthcare industry, most organizations keep PCs for 5 to 7 years," according to Joseph Sorrenti, VP of Infrastructure at Interfaith. "The problem is that around year 4, PCs begin to experience costly and disruptive breakdowns.  But with no moving parts, the Wyse devices should have a longer life, with significantly lower maintenance."

Now that Wyse thin clients have proved themselves in Interfaith's high-pressure training environment, the Interfaith IT team is eager to deploy them more widely across the organization.  These days, whenever a PC needs to be replaced, Interfaith puts in a Wyse thin client.

"We're a small IT team, working on a tight budget," added Nasir. "We were initially wary of the backend costs of this solution, in servers, storage, and licenses, but those have been more than offset by the fact that thin clients are cheaper than PCs, and take less time and money to implement, maintain, and redeploy.  And even more important, they deliver rock-solid reliability and speed.  They help ensure our staff always have what they need to fulfill our mission of delivering excellent patient care, while freeing up financial resources for further investment in serving patients."

"The team at Interfaith did an amazing job not only in improving patient care and reducing the strain on IT  resources, they also took a very creative approach in introducing thin clients to their end users," said Maryam Alexandrian, Senior Vice President Worldwide Sales and Channels at Wyse.  "People can be resistant to change and by showing the benefits of Wyse thin clients during their MEDITECH training program, they convinced everyone of the benefits of trading their PCs for Wyse thin clients."

"Again and again, we are seeing healthcare organizations able to reduce costs and improve patient care by updating their IT infrastructure to a more user-centric model," said Vittorio Viarengo, vice president, End User Computing Products, VMware.  "The team at Interfaith Medical Center has demonstrated real ingenuity in extending a combined VMware and Wyse virtualization solution to the desktop to free up financial resources for further investment in patient care and provide greater flexibility to the doctors and nurses."

More information on the deployment at Interfaith Medical Center is available at: http://www.wyse.com/resources/casestudies/CS-InterfaithMedical-register.asp

About Wyse Technology

Wyse Technology is the global leader in cloud client computing, leveraging its industry-leading thin, zero and cloud PC client solutions combined with its advanced management, desktop virtualization and cloud software – on any computing platform; desktops, laptops and next generation mobile devices.  Wyse provides the most complete combination of software, hardware and service solutions for its more than 200 million users.  Cloud Client Computing is the ultimate client computing solution for our time. It replaces the outdated computing model of the unsecure, unreliable, un-green and expensive PC.  It delivers the most optimized security, reliability, total cost of ownership, and user experience with the lowest energy usage.  It simply connects all the dots: Thin and zero client computing, unified communications, desktop virtualization and the web for users to reach the clouds – in a private, public, hybrid or government cloud.  It is software.  It is hardware.  It is services.  It is in business.  It is at home.  It is on the go.  It is freedom – so users can focus on what is important.  Wyse partners with industry-leading IT vendors, including, Citrix®, CSC®, IBM®, Microsoft®, and VMware®. Wyse also partners with globally-recognized distribution and service partners along with its award-winning partner programs to service any customer, anywhere and anytime, in the world. Wyse is headquartered in San Jose, California, U.S.A., with offices worldwide.

For more information, visit the Wyse website at http://www.wyse.com or call 1-800-GET-WYSE.  *All brands and names mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective holders.

VMware, VMware View, VMware vSphere and VMworld are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.