I'd like to re-introduce to you Allan Leinwand, one of my partners here at Panorama Capital. I posted a blog Allan wrote on an investment thesis that we call the Internet System back in July (you can find that post here).  Recently, Allan's been exploring the world of web desktops and writes about the technology choices in the following post:

Are you Ready for a Web Desktop?

PCs are the bane of IT admins existence. Desktops are traditionally difficult to deploy, maintain and secure. Worse yet are laptops that have the same issues, move around and frequently get lost or damaged. And they’re cheap to purchase so everyone has one (or in some cases two). Lots of point solutions have been developed and deployed to solve these problems – everything from desktop security applications to software that encrypts the entire hard drive of a laptop. The end result is a frustrating environment for both the user and admins (how many passwords do you type before logging into your PC these days?).

For a lot of IT admins, managing the software that manages and secures the desktop just got to be too much. They gave up and essentially got rid of the PC on your desk. People deployed products like Citrix or Microsoft Terminal Services that install a client on the PC and proceed to dumb it down to a keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) device that talks to software on a server housed in a data center. That solves the problem with high costs, dramatically reduced performance and loss of flexibility. For some IT environments, such as call centers and trading floors, this trade-off and expense is more than likely justified.

With the complexity and scope of the issue involved here, it seems to me that this market is ripe for innovation and a technology refresh (two key things I look for when examining a space for a potential venture investment). There are three trends that I’ve seen in the market developing for making the PC manageable:

1)      Use next generation KVM. You can place the desktop in the corporate data center and then put a KVM on the desk. ClearCube has an innovative solution that installs a blade-server for each user in the data center instead of a desktop and then connects the users’ desk to the blade using their own KVM device.

2)      Use a thin client. Wyse and Neoware advocate deploying a thin client on the desk (no PC involved) and then connect to centralized servers.

3)      Outsource the desktop entirely via your browser. This nascent market shows some promise with services from Sapotek and Goowy. Interestingly, both of these companies provide desktop services in a browser implemented in Adobe Flash.

Today, every IT administrator I talk to with more than 10 PCs under management whines incessantly about the multiple issues (security, compliance, and so on). Will one of the three solutions above solve that pain? Are you really ready to give up your PC for a web desktop and will that solve a pain point for the IT administrator?

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