May 7th, 2012
By Charles Babcock at Information Week
Dell partners with Desktone to become a direct supplier of virtual desktops. Here's how this twist on desktop virtualization differs from Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View.
Dell will be at Citrix Systems' Synergy user group conference in San Francisco this week, talking about its ability to deliver virtual desktops in partnership with VMware and Citrix Systems. No surprises there. More surprising, however, is its partnership with a younger and smaller company, Desktone.
Desktone provides virtual desktops through a cloud-based, desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) platform, and will work with both Citrix and VMware virtual machines. As such, it is "hypervisor agnostic," said Desktone CEO Peter McKay in an interview.
Dell's Desktone-based service, Dell Simplified DaaS has been available to a handful of customers for a month, and is now available to all, Dell announced Monday.
Desktone is different from Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View, in that it provides virtual desktops from servers in an external data center, giving an IT department a portal-based management console through which it may manage the desktops that company employees create.
