Teradici CAS Manager has been available up to now solely as a service, but increased demand for CAS during the pandemic also brought with it demand for more deployment options, as well as greater scalability in deployment.
Vancouver-based Teradici is best known as the creator and provider of the PCoIP [PC over IP] protocol for virtual workplace architecture. But they also make Cloud Access Software, which enables remote support for virtual workstations, and a key component of that is its Cloud Access Software [CAS] Manager. Teradici has just announced a pair of major enhancements to CAS Manager. For the first time, it is available outside of a service consumption model, to accommodate customers who want to deploy it on-prem or in the cloud and run it themselves. In addition, its capacity has been scaled up, to allow it to manage more devices than before.
As a component of a product that is not Teradici’s best known offering, CAS Manager is not really that well known.
“CAS Manager has been a little hidden from what Teradici has mainly talked about in the past,” said Ziad Lammam, VP, Product Management at Teradici. “It is one of the core parts of our Cloud Access Software. It’s not a separate thing. It acts as the control plane for the remote desktop, and we have expanded its support over the last few years, so that it now supports all three major public clouds.”
Until now, however, CAS Manager had been available only as a service.
‘As-a-service is a great consumption model for many customers because it is easy to use,” Lammam said. “During the pandemic, however, as people used more VDI and usage of CAS Manager rose quite a bit, as more virtual workstations were deployed, we saw an interest from some customers in not wanting to have a service be the only available deployment model. Some customers want to maintain full ownership of data for security or privacy concerns, or want to manage the software for themselves, whether they install in on-prem or in the public cloud.”
Lammam said that this hybrid cloud capability will continue to be a strong focus of CAS Manager, as its functionality continues to expand going forward.
“Every time we have expanded CAS, we have done it around a hybrid model,” he noted. “We believe that’s here to stay. That’s one reason that some customers will stick with the service for the longer term.”
The most significant of the two enhancements to CAS Manager with this release gives customers that choice about how and where they want to deploy the software.
“It takes the as-a-service software and creates a version that a customer can install themselves,” Lammam said. “Because the customer can install the administrative model themselves, that meant that its capability also had to be beefed up, because we are no longer doing the ‘under the hood’ operations ourselves.”
The other change is also focused on strengthening the solution’s scalability.
“The guts of CAS Manager has a security gateway component, and we also increased the throughput for that, so that it can handle more concurrent sessions,” Lammam indicated.
“We think that our partners will really appreciate the new deployment model, because if the customer was not able to deploy the as-a-service model, now they have an option for them that works,” he added. “There are plenty of use cases, like health care, and dark sites, where customers can’t use this model. The deployment flexibility removes that objection.”
Lammam also noted that Teradici CAS has had something of a cosmetic facelift as well.
“Part of this launch was doing some rebranding of the Teradici CAS colours and logos, across the website,” he said. “It’s not a huge overhaul, but it is an enhancement.”
