As part of its ongoing move towards becoming a major player in the cloud market, Dell recently slipped out an announcement with a surprising partner, Desktone. Desktone, most known for their desktop as a service (DaaS) platform which runs with both Citrix and VMware virtual machines is the newest offering available under the Dell Simplified DaaS service. For organizations looking for a solid VDI model, this might be just the trick.

There are many different types of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) models available, and the nice thing about this particular offering is that unlike the competition, Desktone offers virtual desktops from servers hosted in an external data centre which can be managed through a portal. Dell will leverage the multi-tenant platform and use the model as a way to provision end user desktops for customers from its own datacenters, which means slowly moving away from supplying physical desktops/laptops but instead offer virtual desktops and services to run on any supported platform.

This is a smart move for Dell as more employees are asking for flexibility in their devices. Instead of losing the market to competition, Dell is making the smart move of adapting their business model to take advantage of these trends. Layer on top of this the Dell Secureworks managed security offerings, and it’s a pretty robust solution for organizations who want to get out of handling such things internally. It’s even more attractive to the SMB market as they try to balance small IT teams and business requirements.

The great thing about a service like this is that it scales beautifully to handle the demand of tons of employees logging on in the morning (think about the network traffic and server requirements that would be needed to handle an in-house solution) and managing the infrastructure and applications required by employees to meet the unique requirements of your business. The end users can access their desktops from just about any device, and customize it just like a regular desktop without a heavy footprint in the backend. It can also leverage Active Directory to assign privileges and types of machine builds and adjust memory based on user profiles.

These types of services will start to become more attractive as companies look for ways to scale back costs. Maintaining large fleets of laptops and desktops, plus managing demand for BYOD will make this type of solution more commonplace as organizations start to leverage cloud services.