Desktops as a Service

By VSM News Staff
published: Monday, April 21 2008

  The following is an interview with Desktone CEO Harry Ruda.

HR: Certainly. My career grew up, if you will, in the communications sector. I worked in and gained most of my early experience at a public data networking company called Time Net and really began entrepreneurship in 1984 with my first company, called Network Switching Systems, building large, integrated voice and data switches. In fact, Desktone is really very evolutionary because at one point in my career I was Vice President at Bell Atlantic, a big communications carrier. One of my responsibilities at that carrier was to develop and implement new value-added services that would offer a significant profit to, not only Bell Atlantic, but to all of its various entities. So I was thinking about value-added services for large, integrated telecommunications way back in the late ‘80s. Most recently, I was a co-founder and Chief Executive of a company called Softricity, which was, arguably, one of the early players in the virtualization space. We like to think that we helped create the concept of application virtualization. That company was acquired by Microsoft about two years ago. And if you think about the convergence of value-added services, on the one hand, virtualization on the other, we really get to the concept of Desktone, which is where I am right now.

HR: The idea for Desktone was conceived really at one of our customers back at Softricity, a large financial company on Wall Street. The project was about virtualizing an entire desktop, or what they called internally a virtual workstation project. Softricity was engaged as a component of the overall solution. That’s what really seeded the idea of actually building a technology that would enable companies, like this particular financial services firm, to be able to implement virtual workstations, or desktops, for their entire community of users. The founder of Desktone, a gentleman by the name of Eric Pulier, who’s a classic serial entrepreneur, was engaged on a different project at Merrill Lynch, saw the opportunity and decided to build a company, Desktone, to take advantage of the technologies that would enable the implementation of virtual desktops. After the Softricity acquisition by Microsoft, he approached me to assume the leadership role here at Desktone, which I was more than grateful and excited to do. That was in late 2006, and I’m happy to say that we’ve grown significantly since our early founding. Desktone is all about building a platform that enables the cost-effective implementation, delivery, management and utility of desktops, but those desktops are virtual desktops and they’re delivered specifically in a subscription, services-based model. That’s really the focus of the company since its early founding.

HR: There’s a lot of activity and a lot of success, actually, in the virtualization area. As I said, Softricity was engaged in virtual applications; companies like VMWare, Citrix and Microsoft are very much engaged in developing solutions for virtual servers and, I think, have been very successful doing so. There are a lot of benefits that accrue when implementing virtualization within the computing space. Virtual desktops are an outgrowth of the success that prior companies have had in virtual servers. The advantages of virtual desktops to an organization are all about being able to lower the cost of computing and servicing desktops for its employees. It also enhances the manageability of the desktops since we centralize the desktops into a data center, and it improves security with centralized control of the desktops. IT can better control who gets a desktop, how the desktops are formed, and what users can be authorized to work with. Virtual desktops by itself, as a class, as a technology, is really a compelling solution for virtually any size organization.

HR: : I think that’s the most significant question here. First off, let me explain that Desktone is not a virtualization company per se. That is, we do not develop new virtualization technologies. We leverage virtualization technologies that have already been developed by companies like VMWare and Microsoft, on virtualization technologies like Xen. What we have done is, from the ground up, architected and built a solutions platform that enables the implementation of virtual desktops, but specifically as a service. We enable the concept of desktops as a service by providing a solution—the Desktone Virtual-D Platform—that makes it easy for service providers to deliver this service, and easy and cost-effective for enterprises to adopt virtual desktops. Our focus has always been on the requirements that service providers, large telecommunications companies or other such service providers, need in order to deliver virtual desktops as a monthly subscription, annuity-based service to corporations. Because of our focus on service providers, we had to build and architect a solution that is very unique because they have to think in terms of huge scale. Unlike a customer organization where there might be thousands of users that would come up on a virtual desktop, service providers offering this service to multiple companies have to think in terms of hundreds of thousands, or potentially millions, of desktops. As you start to look at the cost model of servicing that broad a user base, again, across multiple corporations, then you realize that the existing technologies and platforms are unable to and incapable of delivering a very low cost service for these service providers. Hence, our technology is specific to the needs of these service providers and, insofar as that’s our singular focus, our platform is significantly differentiated. In fact, I believe we are the only company that is offering a platform specifically architected to enable service providers to offer virtual desktops as a service.

HR: On the one hand, the benefits of virtual desktops are clear. Analysts and customers envision the benefits of lower cost, greater security, better manageability, et cetera. However, in reality, many customers have had difficulties implementing a broad-scale virtual desktop solution internally. The primary constraint, I would say, is the complexity of the solution. There are multiple vendors involved: hardware, software, network, integration points, management solutions. It’s still a very complex process for implementing internally, and the costs are not nearly as low as an organization may have originally conceived. That’s because you’re moving the support of the desktop from the desktop really, into a data center, so the entire cost model changes. There’s also the fact that a lot of corporations are finding difficulty with data center availability. The cost of power, the facilities, the cooling conditions, make it problematic for many corporations to actually move desktops into a data center. There are also organizational issues. Again, when enterprises move the support and management from the desktop into their data center, they’re crossing organizational boundaries. From an organizational control perspective, there have been issues in terms of who is responsible for ultimately implementing and paying for the solution. That has been a lot of the feedback we’re hearing, that virtual desktops, let’s call it VDI – virtual desktop infrastructure – is a very promising, incipient technology, but implementation inside organizations today is complex and costly and, as a result, adoption has been very slow.

HR: : So this is a really good segue, based on what I’ve just talked about regarding the constraints for adoption of virtual desktop infrastructure. We believe that desktops as a service provides all the benefits that VDI promises without the obstacles, without the constraints imposed by having companies actually try to implement VDI internally. Desktops as a service is a methodology for corporations to realize the benefits of VDI by actually having virtual desktops solutions deployed without having to cobble together and deal with the complexity and cost of doing it internally. It’s a turnkey solution, delivered to a corporation through a service provider, and it essentially changes, not only the ease of implementation, but also converts the cost model from a fixed capital expense, which companies would have when implementing internally, when they would have to essentially buy and maintain all the technologies, to a monthly operating expense. In today’s financial climate, it’s a big benefit to balance sheets to be able to convert that CAPEX to OPEX. Once you have a very discreet and predictable cost, it becomes very linear so you can judge, estimate, and forecast your expenses much more easily. So desktops as service, we believe, is a natural benefit to businesses, and it provides significant benefits to service providers insofar as it enables them to offer a new, value-add service—one that enterprises want but can’t feasibly implement themselves—on top of their existing infrastructures. It lets service providers leverage their investments in data center and connectivity resources to deliver this much-needed service.

HR: This is very evolutionary. We’re in the early stages of virtual desktop implementations. Today we made a major announcement—the availability of the Desktone Virtual-D Platform, which is the first solution that enables service providers to offer virtual desktops as a service. And we disclosed that Merrill Lynch is using our platform, and that service providers such as Verizon, IBM, T-Systems and SoftBank, are partnering with us to deliver desktops as a service based on the Virtual-D Platform. We expect to see, over the next year or two, that desktops as a service begins to really take off. For Desktone, over the next couple of years, it’s all about improving efficiencies. The costs, like any other service model, will typically go down as service providers gain more users and economies of scale. Part of Desktone’s responsibility is to continually provide innovative technology that allows service providers to continue to reduce the cost of delivering the service, providing more significant scalability, better density, in the servers that are used for the service, providing better management tools. We have a roadmap that takes us well into the future in terms of new capabilities and new innovations that will get added to our platform. But I also see, maybe in more of a visionary sense, that many of the service providers we’re talking to now are looking at expanding the market. We’ve been talking all along about enterprise organizations using this service, but we also see this as a potentially valuable service for consumers. And I think over the next several years, there will be more service providers who will target the consumer marketplace and we have to be adept at delivering the support within our platform to enable service providers to deliver this service to a consumer-oriented marketplace as well.

HR: Virtualization has been getting tremendous uptake over the last four or five years. Much of the technology, much of the innovation of virtualization, has been focused on the server, the processing that occurs for applications within a data center. Most analysts are predicting, and we certainly concur with this view, that virtual desktop or client technologies will be the single greatest growth trend in the computer industry. We’ve seen analyst reports that forecast anywhere from 30 million virtual desktops to as many as 600 million virtual desktops during the next several years. It is the single biggest growth area in computing, and I think the movement toward virtual desktops is irreversible. Within the next couple of years it will be a major wave and the single greatest focus for companies to invest in. Ultimately, if our vision is realized, then the computing paradigm will change from owning a desktop, from owning a PC, to actually getting your computing, whether you’re a consumer or you work for a corporation, delivered to you as a service. To me, that is the ultimate realization of the Desktone dream.

HR: The best place would be our Web site, www.desktone.com. With today’s major product news, we also launched a refreshed web site that provides significant information on our business, the Virtual-D Platform, and the benefits of desktops as a service for enterprises and service providers.

Desktone.com , Desktone Virtual-D Platform , Softricity