Sphere 3D Corporation today announced the launch of the first-ever converged virtualization solution for Managed Service Providers ("MSP"s).  The Sphere 3D Converged MSP Solution ("SCMS") includes custom configurations of the V3 appliance, storage, industry-standard desktop virtualization, and the app virtualization platform Glassware 2.0.

The new solution has been in production with various clients since the initial part of this year. New trials are also underway and in planning stages with several North American MSPs in conjunction with Ericsson, a world leader in the rapidly-changing environment of communications and managed services technology.

"MSPs can expect more change in the next 2 years than they've seen in the past 15," said Peter Tassiopoulos, CEO of Sphere3D. "Service providers are embracing the changes that accelerate and diversify revenues to ensure their strong future growth. Through this new offering and the support of our partners we are able to provide a turn-key solution that allows MSPs to increase recurring monthly subscription revenue while expanding their range of business offerings to customers."

SCMS is the industry's first converged solution and the first architecture that supports public, private or hybrid deployments. This distributed architecture is possible due to the strategic combination of technologies including the Desktop Cloud Orchestrator management software ("DCO").

In addition, SCMS provides a configurable foundation that enables MSPs to generate new monthly revenue streams from the sale of virtual hosted workspaces with the flexibility to deploy through a choice of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS).

The highlights of SCMS are as follows:

• Delivered on high performance V3 Desktop Cloud Computing appliances that support 25 - 400 virtual Windows® desktops per unit;
• Provides guaranteed performance that is 2 - 8x faster than physical desktops;
• The drop-in server appliances elegantly integrate into an industry standard hypervisor infrastructure (whether at the customer site or the datacenter), to provide the computing and local storage needed for hosting virtual desktops;
• DCO simplifies the creation and management of virtual desktops, including policies for failover and replication;
• Utilizes Glassware 2.0 to add standalone application virtualization and migration of legacy applications.
• Provides the ability for MSPs to seamlessly integrate virtual desktops alongside physical PCs and remote desktop session hosts; and
• Allows MSPs to standardize on a minimum set of desktop images and application libraries through on-demand personalization.

With Sphere 3D's converged infrastructure solution, MSPs can now provide enterprise grade capabilities to organizations of all sizes. For more details, visit http://sphere3d.com/managed-service-providers/

Industry research shows an increasingly high interest and demand for the convergence of cloud and virtualization technology, said Entelechy Associates analyst Simon Bramfitt in an interview with Forbes.com, who also noted the great benefit to software and service providers of supporting additional customer bases in homogenous user populations with existing Windows applications, and delivered in a cost effective and seamless way.

"Sphere 3D's cloud-based DaaS solution is the foundation of our IT environment, providing our employees with highly available, consistent and reliable access to cloud services through high-performance virtual desktops with failover and disaster recovery across 3 continents," said Sunny Sengupta, vice president of Digital and IT at Leisure Pools.  "We have significantly reduced IT's management of individual desktops, allowing us to focus this vital resource on developing additional applications that expand workforce productivity instead."

"With this new converged infrastructure solution, Sphere 3D has addressed a vital market need," said Sylvain Boyer, CEO Nuvollo Corporation "It allows us to transition our focus from technical integration to business value and rapid solution adoption, at a lower total cost of ownership for our customers. We selected the V3 Series drop-in solution because it simplifies administration and enables us to seamlessly manage hybrid distributed client environments."