The Tadpole side of the business

The Tadpole side of the business
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Longtime readers of Pen Computing Magazine may remember the occasional coverage of Tadpole, a company that started life in 1983 in the UK. In the mid and late 1980s, there was much excitement about moving to Unix, and with that came efforts to provide Unix not just in large workstations and servers, but also in small packages. So Tadpole tried to create Unix-based notebooks. Those never became mainstream products, but were pretty successful in government, for Unix demonstrations, and in some vertical markets. At some point Tadpole ran Unix on Telxon (later acquired by Symbol Technologies) 1192 with battery such as Acterna FTB-100 Battery, Acterna FTB-400 Battery, Acterna MTS-5000 Battery, Acterna MTS-5000E Battery, Acterna MTS-5100 Battery, Anritsu Lite3000(E) Battery, EXFO FTB-100 Battery, EXFO FTB-400 Battery, EXFO FTB-150 Battery, EXFO FTB-200 Battery, EXFO XW-EX002 Battery, EXFO Batterypen computers and used them as Java tablets.
The company was doing well until the late 1990s, but was hard hit by the technology downturn in 2000/2001. There was a management change and Tadpole split into a hardware and a software side. In recent years business predominantly came from government, roughly 80% of the business, which appreciates the stability and security of the Sun Microsystems Solaris platform. The life cycle of Unix applications is generally a lot longer than that of Windows apps, and so there are numerous older systems and applications that remain in active, productive use. One value proposition of Tadpole is to support all those older governmental applications. In all likelihood, the Federal Government will continue to use Solaris, with Trusted Solaris probably being the securest OS on the planet. As a result it is used for mission-critical applications where servers cannot afford to be down. Tadpole's product development roadmap is therefore geared towards military/government.
In September of 2005, Tadpole, which had been working with General Dynamics for a long time, became a GD company and its products are now marketed, serviced and sold through Itronix.
The challenge ahead for Tadpole is the design and positioning of its next generation products. Most Sun's SPARC processors are really for large servers. The "Niagara" multi-core SPARC processor with 8 cores is a lower-cost solution, but its single floating point processor makes it more suitable for certain applications than for others. Another possibility is the highly regarded AMD Optron CPU.
Tadpole also offers thin clients. The definition of a "thin client" is somewhat vague, but generally refers to a device - desktop or notebook - that has no local storage or processing power. Instead, it connects to a server and has just enough smarts to run even complex applications on its display. As a result, sessions can be started and then continued on another computer. And since there is no local storage, everything is totally secure and nothing can be stolen or copied. Devices are protected by SmartCards. Insert the card and you can start or pick up a session. Administration is much simplified compared to conventional networks, and there may be additional cost savings due to software licensing and so on. Just a few staff can handle a large number of users. While others have put forth their own thin clients/network computers/webpads, Sun's Sun Ray concept, championed by then CEO Scott McNealy, is perhaps the purest thin client implementation, essentially consisting of a flat panel display with smartcard reader access. Tadpole packaged Sun Ray technology into notebooks based on high quality Compal laptop designs.
Tadpole veteran David Miles demonstrated the use of an Itronix Sun Ray-based thin client. At this point, Sun Ray clients depend on a standard wired or wireless Ethernet. They do not have a browser and thus cannot log into a WiFi network hotspot such as one might find at a Starbucks. The next generation will include a microbrowser and possibly 3G networking support so that users can log on in more locations/settings.
I asked Miles why earlier webpad/Network Computer efforts and initiatives weren't successful and his answer was that the required networking infrastructure just wasn't there in most places, and that servers were not up to the task. The network component has been solved now, and the server component as well. According to Miles, IDC now projects a 40+% annual increase in thin clients over the next few years, resulting in a billion dollar opportunity in thin clients within the next five years. IDC further speculates that 15% of all desktops may soon be thin clients.
Itronix's Tadpole's product lineup is very broad. The Bullfrog models (shown in the picture on the right) are large, heavy notebooks in the 20 pound range that run UltraSPARC III processors. The SPARCBook, Viper and SPARCLE look like standard notebooks and weigh no more than one. On the ultra-thin client side, Itronix offers the Comet 12 (3.15 pounds) and Comet 15 (5 pounds), very light and handy clamshells that are clients to Sun Ray servers. The Comets can be used with FIPS 140-2 security from Fortress Technologies, providing 256-bit AES encryption.