Q&A with Amir Husain of VDIworks

VSM: Tell us about your new announcement and what role your product will play in the DaaS market?

AH: We’re seeing that DaaS is becoming a popular deployment paradigm now. As people realize that managing the infrastructure for in-house VDI can sometimes be more complex than many IT departments bargained for, offloading the complexity of the infrastructure to the cloud just makes more sense for many organizations. Being able to access the service remotely while providing users the ability to be more mobile is a very compelling mix for many enterprises and SMBs.

DaaSManager, our new product, delivers all the benefits usually associated with the Desktop-as-a-service model via a single, unified application. It essentially gives you everything you need to get a DaaS deployment up and running.

VSM: Let’s get into details. Tell us more about DaaSManager and its features.

AH: Well, DaaSManager is a really simple-to-use web based application that combines all the components necessary to deploy Cloud hosted VDI. For example, a connection broker is included and baked right into the system; so is an access gateway that helps users remotely access virtual machines behind a firewall. The application also provides several VM management features, including VM creation from templates, deletion, power control and more. All of this is done by integrating with the free XenServer hypervisor.

In addition to the features, what is incredibly compelling about this product is that we’ve made it completely free. In fact, we’re building it in a way that it can leverage other well-established free system components to create a really compelling end-to-end system absent any licensing costs. Our product is not licensed on a per-core basis, not sold at $300 per seat, but is really 100% free. That's a good price of entry for the average Joe!

From a benefits perspective, clearly, customers will benefit from zero cost, no vendor lock-in, freedom of choice to deploy in public or private cloud environments and significantly lowered complexity which DaaSManager achieves by integrating all the key components in a single solution.

For us, this is a new product line which supplements what we’ve been doing so far. We believe this new offering is capable of completely revolutionizing the DaaS/Cloud hosted desktop delivery industry by simplifying the infrastructure into a single, shrink wrapped app and by not charging for functionality that used to be sold at a premium. We believe we may even bring this technology to smaller SMDs and even some home users who would never have attempted to benefit from DaaS due to cost and complexity. With DaaSManager, anyone with a PC, a broadband connection and a few tablets/phones - can benefit from remote access and consolidated, single PC sharing capabilities from all kinds of devices (tablets, TVs, phones).

VSM: What operating systems does DaaSManager support?

AH: Although Windows continues to dominate the OS landscape, we do have requests coming in now from a considerable number of users who use Linux. Therefore, we are supporting both Windows and Linux virtual desktops. DaaSManager can also be packaged and deployed as a Linux-based virtual appliance.