June 14th, 2012
by Nick Kolakowski on Slashdot
The partnership between Dell and Desktone highlights big IT vendors' movement to the cloud, a move of necessity that also carries risks.
Throw a stone on the show floor at New York’s Cloud Expo 2012, and chances are pretty much 100 percent it’ll hit a company booth demonstrating some product meant to “cloudify” (yes, that’s now a word) a process or piece of software originally designed for on-premises.
Case in point is Dell, which has partnered with Desktone to offer a simplified virtual-desktop deployment. Desktone offers a multitenant platform for what it calls “Desktops as a Service,” hosted in Dell’s datacenters. The service is also capable of delivering the desktop environment to mobile devices, and can scale from a few seats to thousands. Indeed, in a demonstration on the Cloud Expo show floor, it took only a few minutes to spin up a handful of virtual desktops for a completely hypothetical business.
The idea of Dell pairing with a company to facilitate “desktops as a service” might seem a bit strange in light of Dell’s massive hardware business. However, any PC-manufacturing business wrestles with lower margins compared to technology segments such as software; just ask Dell rival Hewlett-Packard, which recently ended some frantic soul-searching over whether to spin off its Personal Systems Group—responsible for manufacturing its laptops and other systems—as an independent entity (HP decided to keep it in-house).
Read Nick's full article on Slashdot.org
