Pano Logic

» see panologic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Pano Logic was founded in California in 2006 and ran out of Redwood City with around fifty people. John Kish, Aly Orady, Jeff Page and Dana Loof are the names attached to it. Foundation Capital and Mayfield Fund were among the backers, with Goldman Sachs also on the register.

The product was a zero client, and the distinction mattered to the people selling it. A thin client is a small computer running a small operating system. The Pano Device had no local processing at all: a silver or black cube, three and a half inches square and two inches high, with USB for keyboard and mouse, DVI for a monitor, audio in and out, and nothing else behind any of it. It drew about three and a half watts. The company described the device as stateless, which in practice meant that every unit on every desk was interchangeable with every other one.

The real machine was a virtual desktop on a server, brokered by Pano Manager and reached through the Pano Direct Service. Pano Remote in April 2009 was a USB key that did the same job from any Windows PC via a gateway on Windows Server 2008. Pano System 3.0 in April 2010 added Windows XP and Windows 7 support, and Pano Express a month later bundled fifty seats with VMware vSphere Essentials and the Windows licenses and the hardware as one purchase order.

In July 2012 the company announced Pano System for Cloud, and in early September it put out another release widening the platforms it supported. By the last week of October it was no longer trading.

~ the record ~

~ the cube ~

The pitch was straightforward and, for a while, correct. A PC on a desk is a maintenance problem with a warranty attached, and a building full of them is a department of people driving between floors. A zero client has nothing to patch and nothing to lose, so a dead one gets replaced by pulling the cable out of it, and three and a half watts against a few hundred showed up on a power bill that a facilities manager actually read. Credit unions were a good market for exactly that reason. Redstone Federal Credit Union had been working through a replacement of roughly three quarters of its PCs with Pano systems and intended to carry on into 2013.

The weakness was in the same sentence. A Pano Device only worked with Pano's own management software, so the whole proposition was a bet that an organization would standardize on one small vendor's hardware. While that bet was being offered, VMware and Citrix were shipping remote display protocols that ran on any thin client or laptop, and eventually on whatever tablet somebody already owned.

~ the quiet exit ~

English Wikipedia cites an InfoWorld piece dated 2 November 2012 reporting that the startup had closed shop and kept it a secret from its customers, and that silence is why this one gets a page. Customers were left to work it out for themselves. Channelweb reported that a corporate restructuring firm, Sherwood LLC, had been brought in to handle the assets. In March 2013 Propalms announced it had acquired the rights to support Pano Logic customers and would help move them onto a new platform, and Propalms renamed itself Thinspace in 2016. Nobody from the company ever published a reason.

No Pano Device ever crossed a desk I sat at. Zero clients went to IT departments furnishing buildings full of identical desks, and the Turkish offices I have worked in bought laptops instead, because an engineer who travels is not a desk. The shape of the ending still reads clearly from outside it. The device was built to be stateless, and stateless means everything that mattered lived somewhere else and belonged to somebody else. When that somewhere else stopped being paid for, the cube turned back into what it had been the whole time, which was a box of sockets.

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