Desktop virtualisation crosses threshold

Johannesburg, 16 Jul 2008

Desktop dissident Stephen Dukker's NComputing is now selling over a million seats a year based on second-quarter results.

The California-based company has about 6 500 seats installed in SA, mostly in the Western Cape schools system.

"We have crossed an inflection point," says Dukker, NComputing's chairman and CEO.

"Our early success for this technology has been in education and the developing world even though nothing in the NComputing solution was designed specifically for these markets. But school IT administrators quickly recognised the impact of a $70-per-seat solution with 75% capital and operating expense reductions in their desktop infrastructure.

"With the tightening global economy, businesses large and small are moving quickly to NComputing desktop virtualisation as well."

Dukker's product range exploits the fact that today's PCs are so powerful that the vast majority of applications use only a small fraction of their capacity.

NComputing's desktop virtualisation software and hardware tap this unused capacity so that multiple users can simultaneously share it.

Each user's monitor, keyboard and mouse connect to the shared PC through a small NComputing access device, which recreates a true PC experience. The device itself has no CPU, memory or moving parts.

Dukker anticipates that desktop virtualisation will become a dominant enterprise technology due to its low total cost of ownership and better efficiency and manageability as compared with standard PCs.

"NComputing has demonstrated that virtualisation, when deployed with the right set of tools, completely redefines the economics of desktop computing with lower capital costs, lower operating expenses, and with technical simplicity.

"Combined, that has allowed us to reach a million-seat run-rate in less than two years, with most of that volume going into technically limited and some of the most financially restricted places in the world," says Dukker.