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Data tone
VMware’s faith in desktop virtualisation and the potential for hosted and managed solutions was certainly demonstrated by its announcement at VMworld Europe that it has acquired Desktone Inc, the US industry leader that in six years has effectively defined the new Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) model. Desktone (as in ‘dial tone’ or more recently ‘data tone’) has developed an advanced multi-tenant desktop virtualisation platform delivering Windows desktops and applications as a cloud service. Significantly, the Desktone services are delivered through service provider partners, mainly US but including international players such as Dell, Fujitsu and Logicalis.

“We work with two types of partner, with market growth across the board,” says Desktone CEO Peter McKay. “One is the OEM model, where the partner provides a complete virtual desktop architecture with Desktone as the platform to enable it. The other is the local partner, working with the infrastructure provider to add value by supporting the customer and end users. They have the skill sets and local knowledge for everything from a Help Desk function up the stack. Even where they may not have the specific skills sat certain times they have the experience and skills to reach out expertly to the relevant experts as required.”

Virtual desktop is not happening for its own sake. It’s usually when it is wrapped up in a larger business case — easier to change operating systems, coping with BYOD — that the package becomes fully persuasive, Niall Gilmore, Unity Technology Solutions

This is the kind of virtual desktop solution that will appeal strongly to SMEs, McKay says. “It combines local service, a known ‘throat to choke’ as most smaller enterprises prefer, with a state-of-the-art infrastructure. The packages may vary with scale or sector or geography, but the key is the single source for whatever solution is appropriate.”

This is an area where projects have gone wrong in the past in sizing the central infrastructure required. The test environment may run very well and then problems arise when you attempt to scale up to hundreds of users, perhaps even thousands. Desktop workloads and server workloads, for example, are very different and don’t sit well on common technology infrastructure, Howard Roberts, Arkphire

Offline
Both Frieberg and McKay agree that the biggest single obstacle to the wider adoption of the virtual desktop is what it cannot do, work offline in the currently dominant on-premise model. That is less of an issue today as cloud continues to gain acceptance but it is still a factor with large organisations. The hybrid model is increasingly common, they say, where the bulk of employees are in fixed locations while mobile workers and others are served by a hosted and managed service. At that higher end with employee numbers in the tens of thousands, the costs of virtual desktop architecture are still an obstacle. “If you don’t care as much about the three drivers of security, productivity and BD&DR, those costs will continue to be a barrier,” Frieberg says. “We reckon the average is now down to perhaps $35 (€25) per desktop per month. That will have to get below $30 to reach a market tipping point, as we believe it will in 2014.”

That is also a point where Frieberg and McKay agree that some of the big software players may be draw in, some of which have been late and slow to embrace the virtualisation of their applications. A serious partnership with what is now VMware Desktone may be a very attractive proposition, they acknowledge, but could not confirm that SAP and Oracle might figure in that sort of development.

All of which is still somewhat above the market grade in Ireland, where the majority of our enterprises are simply small. On the other hand, the costs may not be such an obstacle, even at the higher end, because the business cases will certainly major on productivity and flexibility. If BC&DR comes with the package, as it were, that is certainly an added attraction while some of them—say in professional or financial services—may value the security aspect.

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