Over one year ago one of the biggest phone carrier in US, Verizon, raised a lot of interest because of the rumors about its technology partnership with the startup Desktone and its plan to develop a VDI in the cloud, something that the industry is calling today Desktop as a Service (DaaS).
After 14 months the Verizon offering is is finally here (at least in US and Europe for now) but it doesn’t seem anymore oriented to the consumer market as the early rumors originally reported.
Called Verizon Computing as a Service (Caas), the platform is powered by several vendors including VMware, HP and Red Hat.
virtualization.info didn’t have the chance to try the service yet, but the press release talks about a fully featured virtual datacenter rather than a virtual desktop on demand:
…Customers have access to a real-time, self-service portal that lets them dynamically provision and manage physical and virtual servers, network devices, storage, and backup services. The portal is accessed through the Verizon Enterprise Center, a one-stop resource for customers to manage all of their Verizon services…
An shamefully small picture of the self-service portal is available here.
No words on pricing and most of all no words on the DaaS offering that was rumored to start at $75 / month.