Desktone Offers Cloud Service Providers Easy Path to VDI

Desktone, which bills itself as “the pioneer of cloud-hosted Desktops as a Service,” has launched what they describe as the industry’s first cloud-hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) blueprint for service providers. In essence, the company wants to give its cloud service provider partners a software platform, a reference architecture and a quick-start environment to help get them and their customers started with Desktone-provided cloud desktops.

The company says that in the four years since it first started getting into VDI with the Desktone Platform — and especially in the year since the launch of Desktone Cloud — it has gained a lot of expertise in how to deploy, manage and support virtual desktops — expertise it’s offering to service providers with this new program, according to the press release.

Here’s what Peter McKay, CEO of Desktone, had to say in a prepared statement:

“Service providers are looking for a true cloud-based desktop ‘as a service’ solution and they’re finding that terminal services and traditional VDI can’t provide the flexibility, performance or ROI they require. These technologies, which were built for on-premise deployments, cannot just be moved to a cloud service delivery model. We’ve been fielding a tremendous amount of inquiries from service providers and managed service providers (MSPs) that want to leverage our expertise for hosted VDI in the cloud. We developed this blueprint over the years to meet their needs.”

So what’s in the box? According to Desktone, the Cloud-Hosted VDI Blueprint includes:

VDI providers made a strong showing in the 2011 MSPmentor 100 list, proving that managed service providers still want desktops-as-a-service. But some cloud pundits are declaring VDI as DOA. Of course, if we hear strong Desktone partner momentum off of this announcement, that would quiet that argument fairly soundly.

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