Workspot launches Cloud Desktop Fabric

Desktop as a service provider Workspot launched Cloud Desktop Fabric in January, claiming the new virtual desktop architecture will improve performance by connecting users to cloud resources closest to them.

The Cloud Desktop Fabric uses the Azure platform to deliver Windows 10 desktops to users around the world. Michele Borovac, Workspot chief marketing officer, said that the architecture is an improvement over previous virtual desktop products because it takes advantage of Microsoft's cloud infrastructure.

"A challenge that [businesses] run into is that these legacy architectures were really designed with one location in mind," Borovac, who was named CMO in October, said. "They were designed for an on-prem data center and logging into resources from that centralized environment."

Michele Borovac

Borovac said that when an organization has employees around the world, older virtual desktop systems can run into trouble with performance and scalability. By connecting workers to regional cloud resources, she added, businesses will likely see a boost in virtual desktop performance.

"As a SaaS platform that is able to operate in any of the Azure regions around the world, what we're giving IT is a centralized console that allows them to pick and choose the right type of desktop resource for a specific set of users in the region closest to them," she said.

Workspot is also touting its analytics tools as a key feature of the Cloud Desktop Fabric. Co-founder and CEO Amitabh Sinha said identifying connection and performance problems quickly has become an area of increased focus for IT admins.

Amitabh Sinha

"One of the things we've heard from customers is that they want to be able to reduce the time it takes to notice a failure and the blast radius of that failure," he said. "What we built was a real-time data collection, analysis and collation engine. We collect data from the desktop, the endpoint, the Azure regions, the gateways they're connecting to -- from a whole bunch of different systems."

Sinha said problems can come from a variety of sources. He recalled an instance in which Workspot alerted a financial services firm of a connection issue at 4 a.m. That firm investigated and learned that its internet service provider had changed some of its settings. According to Sinha, the company was able to adjust before employees started coming in at 8 a.m.

Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Mark Bowker said Workspot is positioning itself to compete with Citrix.

Mark Bowker

"Workspot comes in clean. They have a clean slate," he said. "Citrix is in a situation where they have a lot of legacy to update and upgrade and move the customers along."

Without that legacy architecture, Bowker said, Workspot is able to use Azure's global reach to quell virtual desktop performance issues for worldwide organizations.

"There are other ways to deliver [desktop as a service], but [they] may have to come out of a regional data center," he said. "If I have employees that are out of region, then I have latency concerns, and that consumption model … will not work."