Desktone brings desktop-as-a-service to the UK

Desktone provides the framework for hosted desktop services

Desktone is bringing its desktop-as-a-service platform to the UK, enabling companies from small businesses up to enterprise firms to outsource workers' desktops as a hosted service operated from a datacentre.

The company's Virtual-D technology framework enables service providers to operate an outsourced desktop service. Desktone already counts IBM and Verizon among its clients in the US, but IT distributor CDG has now formed a company called Cloud Group to support service providers in the UK.

"Our technology is unique and differentiated to meet the needs of this market. The platform has to be multi-tenant and we have to think in terms of scale, as customers may have anything up to hundreds of thousands of users," said Desktone chief executive Harry Ruda.

With desktop-as-a-service, user desktops are hosted in a datacentre and workers log in via a web page. Access can be provided from re-purposed end-of-life PCs, thin client terminals, or any device that supports the necessary remote screen protocols.

The advantage of this approach is that customers pay only for what they need, and scale up their use of the service if and when they require.

Desktone's platform is a framework for service providers to build such a system, rather than marketed directly to end users, and Cloud Group is providing a UK presence.

"We are a proxy for Desktone in EMEA," said CDG's Morten Moland, who is heading up the Cloud Group.

Moland explained that Virtual-D differs from the virtual desktop infrastructure provided by vendors such as VMware and Citrix in several key ways.

"If you look at VMware View, if you access a virtual desktop it is hosted in a local datacentre. If you fly to New York and log on, your desktop is still being delivered from the same datacentre," he said.

With Desktone's platform, a user's desktop can be delivered from whichever of the service provider's datacentres is closest, improving the user experience by cutting latency, he explained.

Cloud Group already has a pan-European service provider signed up, which is set to announce its desktop-as-a-service offering in the UK within the next 30 to 60 days, Morten said, but he declined to name the company involved.

This should be just the first of many desktop-oriented cloud services to come online within the next few quarters, Morten added. These are expected to serve every size of company, from the smallest business right up to the largest multi-national.

"We are looking at different service providers to deliver a different level of service for various market tiers," said Morten.

While desktop-as-a-service has so far appealed mainly to smaller firms, Morten claimed that there is now interest from enterprises looking to outsource the management of corporate desktops.

"Desktop management is complex, and this is one way to standardise and cut costs," he said.