Most estimates put the enterprise desktop costs between $3000.00 and $5000.00 USD per year. Most of the costs come from help desk/support. Desktop “appliances” and DaaS can help. Virtual desktops and DaaS solutions are growing and ThinClient desktop appliance vendors are growing rapidly to meet this demand. Replacing all 150Watt desktops with modern low power (e.g. 2 watt, see below) diskless appliances along with a bunch of power efficient servers has a significantly lowered carbon
footprint.
CherryPal announced yesterday a new gadget – a small PC replacement, which for a mere $250 offers users all the usual applications on a 2Watts “machine” without the hassle of dealing with software updates, operating systems, and viruses.
Moderro is another example of PCs going fully onto the clouds. These guys started out with markets that yearn for simplification and manageability: libraries, kiosks, schools, public terminals. Ultimately trying to target the enterprise space and consumer. Cloud-based desktop persistence, cloud-based configuration, management and remote support. Not using cloud storage for documents – the web apps take care of their own data.
Desktone.com is an example of DaaS concept, a similar idea to a cloud-based PC.
And GoGrid is one of the examples of completely outsourcing your server needs. And here a longer list of cloud platforms, providers and enablers.
Thanks. This should be an interesting thread. That last URL needs to be fixed to:
http://groups.google.ca/group/cloud-computing/web/list-of-cloud-platforms-providers-and-enablers
Thanks Martin. Fixed the link problem.
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
Hi Alex – thanks. I have not followed your blog in much details, but there is something that caught my attention on
http://street-streetmachine.blogspot.com/2008/08/inappropriate-billionaire-made-google.html
about the most lonely people on Earth. “It is most often Irish type keywords “loneliness”. The second place was Singapore, the third – New Zealand.” – I live in New Zealand ;o) All three countries are really small and relatively remote from the rest of the globe (New Zealand being the most remote out of these three). Do you have any reference to this or you just used google trends?