Delivering the WorldDesk Dream – The Power of Abstraction

It’s been a week since WorldDesk launched a beta version of their cloud-based desktop delivery solution, leveraging the Dropbox platform. My bet is that this little bit of magic will herald a fundamental change in the way we think about mobile computing and storage. Time will tell. 

For several years we’d been driving the idea of full desktop (or workspace) delivery via the cloud. Tectonic forces seemed to be at play:

• On the one hand, Amazon’s gargantuan effort to build out a global storage platform was creating a resource that we could not have been imagined a decade ago. Google and others aren’t far behind.
• On the other, the virtualisation business (VDI, etc.) seemed to be choking on ever more complex solutions, that took ever longer to set-up and install, required bigger server farms and fatter pipes, and generally seemed to be drowning. Happy customers were few and far between and even the toughest CIOs swoon at the thought of their IT infrastructure costs.
• Meanwhile, mobile computing continues to explode in all four corners of the globe. 

As a result, the challenge became the ability to architect a solution that allowed any user to deliver their Microsoft workspace from the cloud and run it locally, with next to no moving parts, and next to no hassle. The cloud is used for storage and the solution leverages the resources already available on the local machine. 

It all sounds very simple, though for many years engineers broke out in a cold sweat every time simple cloud workspace delivery was mentioned and asserted that it was impossible to achieve, not least because it is actually pretty much impossible with any of the legacy technologies. Similarly business people (and dare I say CIOs) seemed oblivious as to why anyone would want such a solution, despite the fact that Dropbox usage was heading to the moon, as were virtualisation costs, IT costs, and over user frustration leading to the biggest nightmare of all for the CIO; personal iPads mushrooming right across the enterprise (and everywhere else for that matter). 

Anyway, we stuck to our guns, backing the WorldDesk concept through thick and thin, and now we have it; single click workspace delivery from the cloud leveraging Dropbox!

All that said, the real story this week is not the cloud delivery, but the architectural approach that underpins it. 

It’s quite simple really, WorldDesk has rolled desktop architecture back thirty years by developing an abstraction layer that separates all user specific features (applications, user profiles, and data) from the underlying OS. Computer scientists over the age of fifty immediately point out that this is the way things used to be before everything got way too complicated. Others add that many of the solutions in the market today are layering complexity upon complexity, and creating even more pointless complexity!

This week the simplicity of the abstraction layer was used to deliver a workspace from the cloud, next, perhaps the “anti-cloud” solution for the mobile user who never saves any data to the cloud, or maybe Microsoft Office running natively on Android… Who knows!?

Watch this space!

– Danny