At the Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference, Workspot this week announced that it will deliver a desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering via the Microsoft Azure cloud.
While Workspot has an existing relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Brad Peterson, vice president of marketing for Workspot, says the company expects Microsoft to become the dominant provider of cloud services pertaining to desktop and productivity applications.
“Azure is the future,” says Peterson.
In general, Workspot is making a case for a DaaS 2.0 initiative that substantially reduces the number of components needed to create a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment. By making those components available as an Azure offering, Peterson says it now becomes possible for IT organizations to deliver DaaS as a true on-demand service. In fact, VDI has such negative connotations in terms of cost and complexity that Peterson says the IT industry as a whole needs to move away from it.
With the rise of Microsoft Office 356, it’s clear that Microsoft is driving a transformation of how applications are consumed via the cloud. Workspot is betting that as part of that shift, there will be a lot more interest in VDI within the construct of a DaaS 2.0 end-user experience.
It’s too early to say how ready IT organizations are to move entire desktops into the cloud. But now that all manner of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are being used daily, it may only be a matter of time before the entire desktop follows suit.