Ian Brown
IBM brings desktop cloud to market
IBM has announced general availability of its Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offering in Europe. DaaS delivers virtual desktop images to end-user desktops as a subscription service. Target markets are financial services, education and businesses with multiple distributed branch offices. DaaS suits customers that want to minimise the cost and disruption of managing desktops, but fares less well where compliance and service levels are of paramount importance to enterprise or public sector customers.Desktop-as-a-Service marks IBM's attempt to get back into desktop services
In spite of its position as the world's largest IT outsourcer, IBM has not been a leading player in the desktop services business. It sold off its PC business to Lenovo in 2004 and the perception was that IBM was moving out of the end-user services space - its historic home being the data centre. Now, with DaaS, IBM has the opportunity to re-establish itself as an end-user services provider. DaaS is built on desktop virtualisation - Windows client software running in a virtual machine on a server in an IBM or a customer's data centre. There are two versions: the 'public' cloud model in which the service provider (IBM) hosts the virtual desktops in its data centres and the 'private' cloud model in which IBM and other service providers help customers plan, build, deploy and run their own virtual desktop infrastructure. IBM has been helping customers deploy 'private desktop clouds' for a couple of years. In truth, this a grandiose way of describing how IBM has been helping customers to implement Citrix applications virtualisation and VMware virtual desktop infrastructure for certain types of user for whom the technology is appropriate. Now, however, IBM has an offering for which the term 'cloud' is more appropriate. It's ahead of most IT service providers in having a cloud-based shared services offering for the desktop. It is differentiating itself from the Amazons and Googles in offering desktop cloud to the enterprise from robust, identifiable and auditable data centres, the first in North America and now in the UK, with others to follow in Europe and Asia-Pacific. There are three DaaS options:- Standard multi-tenant - IBM hosts shared infrastructure in its data centres; customers don't know which servers or storage their desktops are running on.
- Single tenant - for a higher price, customers get dedicated infrastructure in IBM's data centres.
- Managed - IBM manages the customer's assets at the customer's site.
