On May 2 Desktone, Inc., a US company founded in 2006 and based in MA, announced Desktone 5.0 Platform, the new release of its DaaS platform for service providers and telecommunication companies.
Desktone 5.0 Platform can deliver three sperate types of hosted virtual desktop to end users:
- Hosted Full-Featured VDI: Delivering end users a full-featured desktop that replicates the exact experience of a physical Windows desktop.
- Hosted Shared Leveraging Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH): An ideal option for users such as task workers that don’t require a full-featured desktop.
- Hosted Personal Windows Server: A comparable Windows experience at a more affordable price, often utilized by small to mid-sized companies.
providing multi-tenancy and granting the compliance with Microsoft licensing terms.
Release 5.0 includes DaaS Automation Engine, an OEM oriented feature that automate provisioning and sizing of full tenant environments enabling service providers to offer free “try and buy” deployments.
Another new feature is the multi-data center management capability, that allows dynamic provisioning of hosted desktop, ensuring the shortest path but maintaining centralized administration.
Gabe Knuth, in his article on brianmadden.com, talks about the new change in strategy of Desktone that focuses again towards service providers instead of businesses.
My initial thought on this is that it’s a good move, although I’m left trying to figure out how this is different from the last time they re-tooled. Desktone clearly does DaaS well, and they’ve been solely focused on developing and delivering their DaaS solution for over five years. It stands to reason that service providers would be interested in OEMing a solution from them rather than trying to build on in-house that supports all the use cases and requirements of the Desktone solution. To develop as flexible a solution as they have from the ground up would take forever and be very costly, so in my mind Desktone is doing the right thing by making the technology available to service providers and taking a cut of the action.
Regarding their current enterprise customers, Desktone will continue to support them on the previous platform, but they won’t receive any of the features of 5.0 and subsequent releases. Desktone does use their DaaS systems to test out certain features before implementing them on the released 5.0 product, though. To be clear, they’re not testing on unwitting clients, they’re just using their in-house architecture to vet new features before turning them loose. Existing customers remain on the 4.x product. Of course, there are now plenty of other service providers using the Desktone platform, so they could switch providers and still get the same functionality as they had, plus the new features.