Ncomputing asked to be considered as a presenter on the Education day as a provider of thin client solutions in schools.
I told them since NComputing was primarily a hardware vendor, they weren't quite what we were looking for.
Here's their response. I have to admit, 180,000 Linux desktops in a school system sounds quite interesting, but some of the other comments are less exciting. What does everyone else think? Would it be beneficial to SCALE and Educational FOSS to have them speak?
Tim
--- message from NComputing ---
I appreciate your note earlier but NComputing strongly feels they could be of great benefit to your audience. Here's a note from Gabriele Sartori, who would be the speaker:
Although true, we sell HW, SW is a fundamental part of our IP and it is the special sauce behind our HW. Our Linux terminal server has proven to be a major factor in lowering the cost of computing when associated to our HW and opened new opportunities particularly in education and emerging market. In fact, we have much more SW developers than HW developers.
We enable the entire school system of the country of Macedonia with our solution, with an incredible low budget the Government of Macedonia gave the opportunity to 400000 students to have a computer screen in front of them for the entire daily activities in their classroom. A total of 180K seats when fully deployed. All done in Linux, all done with our SW & HW.
This has been one of the biggest installation of Linux in the history of IT in education, something that make us very proud, not only for the size of the installation but for the ability to put so many student in front of Linux. These guys will grow learning that Linux is a tremendously powerful operating system and will benefit during their entire life from this learning.
The Linux community must understand these things, we can't be discounted as "another thin client company that happen to support Linux" because it is not the case.