Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read a guest blog from Victor’s coworker, Sanjay Upadhyaya of Virtual-Q. Virtual-Q is a technology partner that delivers secure, scalable, and powerful cloud desktop computing from virtually any Internet-enabled device. To learn more about Virtual-Q, visit http://virtual-q.com/.

Taking Your Desktop to The Cloud

There’s good reason there’s so much awareness around cloud computing right now — it’s the fulfillment of an architecture we have all been awaiting, a platform with Cloud resources that flexibly accommodate essential business services. Today, businesses are looking to cloud computing because it wants fast time-to-market and to pay only for what it consumes; that requires IT resources to organically adapt to the business and deliver high performance computing.

Virtual-Q has developed such a platform that has surpassed traditional virtualization technology that exists today. There are several challenges presented in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) techniques that make it impossible to use VMware, Citrix or Microsoft VDI solutions as delivered to the public for a hosted VDI service. By themselves, each respective vendor has an adequate solution for VDI. However when combined together, the resulting platform is far superior.

Using proprietary technology combined with the best technology available today, the Virtual-Q platform, better known as The Q, is setting a performance and scalability landmark across multiple industry sectors with several key benefits:

Extending the PC refresh cycle. The Q transfers the heavy processing from endpoint devices to the cloud. In the past, PCs lasted only three to four years because they couldn’t support the increased processing demands of new applications. Now that the heavy lifting has been offloaded, PCs can be used until they mechanically wear out after six to eight years. In new deployments thin-client devices can be deployed thereby significantly reducing overhead.

Increasing data security. The Q enables organizations to remove all data from the users’ machines and instead host it in the Cloud. Now, a lost or stolen machine means little more than the cost of the device, instead of the potential data breach that used to keep IT folks up at night.

Increasing user productivity and improving employee satisfaction. The Q helps increase user productivity and employee satisfaction in a variety of ways. Using either hosted desktop or hosted application virtualization, your workers can access their desktops, or applications that they could previously only access on their PC, from any device and any location. This enables workers to be productive from places such as a home office or hotel kiosk, instead of only in the office on their corporate desktop. In addition, unmanaged PCs like an employee’s own laptop can run corporate applications; this has proven to lead to an increase in worker productivity as well as satisfaction.

Lower support costs. The Q virtually eliminates one of the most expensive areas surrounding PC support is on-site visits — an on-site support visit can cost eight times as much as a phone-based support call. This means that IT staffers can fix desktop or application problems simply by logging into the server. For PC or thin client problems, organizations are finding that it is less expensive to replace the old or low-cost hardware than spend time troubleshooting. Local application virtualization can also reduce support costs because its isolation capabilities eliminate application conflicts. According to analysts at Forrester, local application virtualization decreases desktop application support costs by 80%.

Instant business continuity and disaster recovery. The Q allows workers to remotely access everything they need to continue working with minimal interruption from virtually any internet accessible device. The majority of workers will have the ability to work from home or from any other while still having access to the applications they need to do their job.

Faster time to complete mergers and acquisitions. Mergers and acquisitions take a lot of time and resources — especially for those charged with onboarding the new employees. The Q enables IT to simply provide access to a worker’s applications or desktop, instead of the previous world of full desktop provisioning.

Support for contractors and other unmanaged workers. The Q provides unmanaged workers secure, managed access to corporate resources.

So now there’s only one question to ask: Is The Q right for you?

-Sanjay Upadhyaya, Virtual-Q