The Bremen-based company ranks fourth in the world market for thin clients behind Wyse, HP and Neoware, with the most recent ranking from analyst firm IDC putting the contenders, by units shipped in the first half of 2006, at 36.9% for Wyse, 18.7% for HP, 16.6% for Neoware and 3% for both Igel and Indian vendor VXL.

In the European market, however, which is only marginally smaller than North America (1.06 million units in 2006 compared to 1.128m in North America for the same period), Igel is much closer to overtaking Neoware for third place, according to Stephen Yeo, its worldwide strategic marketing director, who reckons both companies are hovering around the 10% mark.

As a smaller outfit seeking differentiation from its larger competitors, Igel is pursuing a strategy of cramming more into its devices for equivalent or, in some cases, lower prices than them.

This was visible in January, when it moved part of its product line to the latest generation of silicon from VIA Technologies Inc, which has around 60% of the market for thin client silicon. The Compact low-end device, for instance, was upgraded to the VIA Eden processor and CN700 chipset, which comes with the VIA V4 bus technology, and while other vendors have done the same, only Igel implemented support, made possibly by the VIA technology, for dual screens, i.e. the ability to split the screen to show, say, a Citrix and a Windows Terminal Services instance side-by-side. Presumably the others chose not to do so on grounds of cost, said Yeo.

Beyond such nice-to-have features, however, Igel’s strategy is to burn software clients for multiple digital services into the Flash on its devices so that customers don’t have to go buy another piece of hardware if they want to add IPTV or VoIP to their thin clients, above and beyond the standard fare of ICA (the Citrix protocol) and RDP (the Microsoft equivalent).

Igel is also looking at other ways of reducing customers’ costs with its multi-service approach, Yeo went on.

If you could deploy a native SAP GUI on the client, you’d be able to save on licensing Citrix Presentation Server or, if you were going down the virtualization route, VMware on your SAP environment in the data center, he said. Equally, why host a Web browser in the data center when you can have it natively on a thin client, with full .NET and J2EE functionality, enabling you to run apps like Salesforce.com directly on the thin client.

Yeo said Igel is already offering multiple clients in the Flash memory on its high-end devices and, later this year, intends to extend it to the rest of the range.

Our vision is that, in the future, an IT manager will be able to choose the hardware form factor, but get the same services, regardless of whether he wants a LCD monitor with integration thin client for the point-of-sale, a tablet for a nurse to carry around a hospital, of a simple desktop version for a call center operative, with no rip and replace required to add additional services as time goes by, he said.