DaaS Interview - Paul Gaffney, Desktone COO
It's been a while since we did our last interview, so I'm very excited that we got a chance to sit down with Paul Gaffney, our COO. Paul is an accomplished IT executive, having served as CIO of Staples and also as a senior IT executive at Office Depot and Charles Schwab. As a result, he brings a wealth of real world knowledge and experience with respect to operating large scale IT infrastructure. In this interview, Paul discusses the desktop management challenges he experienced as a senior IT leader and his thoughts on how desktops as a service (DaaS) can help overcome many of those issues.
Jeff Fisher
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IBM announces DaaS deal
In major DaaS news, IBM announced a deal this week to deliver virtual desktops as a service to more than 1,400 devices across 25 schools in Pike County, KY. The solution is being powered by the Desktone Virtual-D Platform and will employ a cloud hosted architecture where the desktops will be running in an IBM data center. The school district's primary interest is in being able to migrate all their users to a common desktop image while simultaneously repurposing their various generations of PCs (running different versions of Windows) as access devices.
This is a big step forward for the desktop hosting business that Desktone is helping to pioneer. We believe that virtual desktops represent the next major hosting opportunity for service providers, building on the continued success of hosted web and email offerings. We are excited to be a part of this innovative solution.
DaaS and Data Loss Prevention
I wanted to start writing some posts that talk about how DaaS relates to certain key trends in IT. The first is Data Loss Prevention (DLP). We talk generally about the security benefits of a centrally hosted computing model but I wanted to dig a little deeper than just saying that DaaS increases client security. DLP solutions represent one of the hottest segments of the security market and as it turns out, DaaS inherently goes a long way to solving many data leakage issues.
“Value Innovation” for VDI
Michael Keen just posted an interesting entry on “Value Innovation”. In it, he discusses the heated competition that’s emerged in the x86 virtualization market and how the primary players have resorted to one-upsmanship (i.e. using standard marketing tactics like bundling) as opposed to really trying to break new ground. He also raises the side issues of virtualization licensing and pricing complexity (challenges that I have been tracking closely) by referencing a recent post on the subject by Tarry Singh. This all leads up to a discussion of “Value Innovation”, a concept pioneered by Charles W. L. Hill and described at length in the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.
The state of stateless computing
It seems everywhere I look these days, people are talking about stateless computing. In just the past week, I’ve had 3 encounters with this phenomenon.