Workspot, which has been challenging Citrix and VMware with its simple to deploy cloud VDI offering, is announcing a version tightly integrated with Azure that they expect will become the flagship product.
Brad Peterson, Workspot’s VP of Marketing
Today, at the Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference, next-gen VDI vendor Workspot has announced they are extending their cloud-native, multi-tenant architecture to offer Desktop as a Service 2.0 (DaaS 2.0) on Microsoft Azure.
Workspot was founded four years ago by senior executives from Citrix and VMware, with the idea being to overcome the traditional limitations of legacy VDI. Amitabh Sinha, who had been General Manager for Enterprise Desktops and Apps at Citrix, is the CEO. Puneet Chawla, the founding engineer on VMware’s View product line, is the CTO. The company has been branding itself as VDI 2.0, offering a cloud-based solution which is much less complex, and far easier for partners to deploy.
The new offering, DaaS 2.0, is intended to be complementary to VDI 2.0, not a replacement for it, at least in the short and mid-term. It extends the original cloud-native, multi-tenant architecture to the Microsoft Azure platform, with which it is now tightly integrated.
“With DaaS 2.0, we couple Workspot with Azure and couple it tightly, in any of the 34 datacentres Azure has,” said Brad Peterson, Workspot’s VP of Marketing.
The interesting thing here is that Workspot was originally built on the AWS cloud, but that now Workspot is placing its bet for DaaS 2.0 on a principal AWS competitor.
“AWS was much more advanced at that time when we got started,” Peterson said. “However, we believe Azure is more mature as a cloud now – and Microsoft is behind it. We are a Microsoft Cloud Solutions Provider, and there is no better partner to have. So we have only tightly coupled with Azure for this DaaS 2.0 offering.”
The deep integration with Azure automates and optimizes resources quickly, to streamline the usage of the virtual network, virtual storage, and compute services included in the Azure infrastructure, maximizing deployment speed, performance, and flexibility and minimizing costs.
“There are significant savings in power management, because when users aren’t using the desktop we power them down and bring the bill down,” Peterson said. “Workspot will also be the cloud aggregator, and we will leverage our economies of scale to provide a single predictable bill to the customer.”
In the long term, Peterson said that DaaS 2.0 will be the flagship product.
“We see this as the future, and see it growing massively and reasonably quickly,” he said. “Three months ago Gartner said there was zero DaaS interest, and they now predict 50 per cent growth by 2019. The issue has been that Citrix and VMware don’t support this well – but we do.”
In the meantime, both product sets will continue.
“We find that a lot of prospects and customers consider the VDI 2.0 model makes the most sense for them,” Peterson said. “Some have a lot of legacy infrastructure, and there are areas with data sovereignty laws and others with no Azure cloud. DaaS 2.0 is the flagship, and we are leading with the flagship. But we are making it clear that VDI 2.0 is there, for the many hybrid cases that exist.
DaaS 2.0 is available now.
