Desktone, Inc., provider of the first platform that enables hosted virtual desktops as an outsourced subscription service, today announced significant new capabilities for its Desktone Virtual-D Platform. The enhancements enable service providers to more easily and cost-effectively scale their Desktone-powered desktops as a service (DaaS®) offerings, while helping end-customers quickly benefit from virtual desktops.

“The market is realizing that DaaS is an inherently faster, lower-cost way to implement virtual desktops than VDI,” says Jeff Fisher, senior director of strategic development at Desktone. “As part of our drive to continually innovate ways to make DaaS even more compelling, these new capabilities streamline both the adoption and management of DaaS. They have been extremely well-received by our service provider partners—including ICC Global Hosting and SoftBank—and their customers.”

Desktone’s Virtual-D Platform enables organizations to quickly realize the cost and flexibility benefits of virtual desktop computing without upfront CAPEX investments. Uniquely designed along two tiers (service provider and enterprise), it lets enterprises keep their data secure within their own network, and maintain ownership and control over their Windows OS images, applications and all relating licensing, while outsourcing the physical data center infrastructure powering their virtual desktops to service providers.

New Capabilities for Service Providers

The new Virtual-D Platform capabilities enable Desktone partners to efficiently scale and operate their services at attractive price points. They include:

• Multi-tenancy: Exposes all the previously-existing, rich multi-tenancy capabilities of the underlying platform, making it easier to create, manage and monitor multiple customers on the same shared infrastructure. It is designed to support tenant isolation across hosted and on-premises infrastructure, including environments with stringent security requirements.
• Multi-data center: Enables service providers to leverage their global data center footprint to support widely distributed enterprise environments and deliver high availability/disaster recovery offerings. Enterprises benefit from improved user experiences over internally implemented VDI, since virtual desktops can be closer to users, and from reliable, continuous service.
• Virtual-D Service Center: A single management web console for service operators to create, manage and monitor many customers on common network, storage, and virtualization infrastructure.
• Improved hosting economics: Giving service providers the ability to choose the virtual desktop building block technologies best suited to their business is a fundamental tenet of the Desktone platform. Service providers now have the option to use a VMware ESX or ESXi environment, with or without Virtual Center, to lower their operational costs.

Enhancements for Enterprises

Enterprise customers can take advantage of the following enhancements to the Virtual-D Platform:

• Rapid service on-boarding: Enterprise administrators can easily upload virtual desktop images to their service provider’s infrastructure to accelerate DaaS implementations and time-to-value.
• Global language support: Multi-national organizations can more easily leverage the Desktone Virtual-D Portal—a self-service, browser-based tool that allows end-users to access and manage their hosted virtual desktops. The portal now includes support for twelve languages.
• Delegated Administration: Roles and permissions can be assigned at different levels to desktop administration, helpdesk and management staff, and—at the end-customer’s sole discretion—back to the service provider. All desktop management and desktop access remains under the end-customer’s user authentication authority (e.g., Active Directory).

Desktone-powered DaaS solutions are available through select Desktone service provider partners. To request additional information, click here.