September 4th, 2012
What a week at VMworld for Desktone. Ending with a red-eye flight with a stop (I have been told it is called a pink-eye?) wasn't my best idea of the week but it still didn't damper my enthusiasm for our industry and Desktone's opportunity to change the virtual desktop market by moving desktops to the cloud. Last year there seemed to be a little bit of a VDI hangover as many folks thought the work involved in deploying VDI was not worth the return.
This year there seemed to be a genuine resurgence in desktop virtualization interest. From the conversations I had it comes from 3 main drivers. First, the horse has left the barn on users wanting to leverage alternative end points like tablets (see this report that estimates >100m tablets will ship this year up from 17m in 2011)!! How are enterprises that still depend on Windows based applications going to support this without changing their desktop strategy? Secondly, it could be that there is less than 20 months before Windows XP is end of lifed. Lastly, the performance is there. We were demoing a Desktone powered DaaS offering leveraging PCoIP delivering seamless multimedia (videos) at our booth from a desktop hosted in a datacenter hundreds of miles away. Whatever the driving force, I am excited to be part of this shift from traditional end points and desktops to cloud service.
We had hundreds of conversations with IT professionals over the past 3 days and there was a recurring theme - how do I implement and scale VDI? Every organization, whether they have already deployed VDI from VMware or Citrix or whether they are evaluating these solutions, have the same problem - how to justify the huge cost to build VDI data centers and the ongoing management. We here at Desktone believe that delivering virtual desktops and applications as a cloud service is the best way to get all of the benefits of VDI without the heavy upfront costs and ongoing management complexity.
Citrix validated this model at Synergy with their announcement of Project Avalon (due sometime in 2013 or 2014). VMware also validated this model in numerous sessions on DaaS and Horizon (still not supporting desktop delivery). Desktone has the only virtual desktop offering available TODAY that enables the delivery of desktops as a cloud service. Desktone built our virtual desktop platform from day one in 2007 for cloud delivery using modern cloud technologies that do not have the same limitations of legacy VDI solutions. Large service providers who have tried these legacy solutions have switched to Desktone as they run into limitations from a cloud perspective.
Service providers like Dell, Navisite and Quest all showed off their Desktone powered cloud-hosted desktop offerings at the VMworld show:
Dell-Wyse Booth - a Desktone powered DaaS demo running PCoIP and 2 standing-oom only theatre presentations!
NaviSite Booth - a Desktone powered DaaS demo
NetApp Booth - our service provider partners Quest Systems and Navisite showing off their Desktone powered DaaS offerings
VMware - highlighted as VMware's partner for offering DaaS to the service provider market with a Dell case study 'Dispelling the Myths of DaaS' session
Enterprise VDI technology has had its time over the past 3-4 years but based on our conversations at VMworld and growth over the past 6 months I have a feeling that DaaS will own the next round. I would guess that the majority of enterprises would prefer a highly flexible, low cost and simple to deploy virtual desktop approach. It is time to leverage the best of what the cloud delivers and the best of desktop virtualization. Our service provider partners proved that desktops delivered as a cloud service delivers the best virtual desktop model at VMworld 2012!
