Many of you may know (or not) that I am working on my new book, ‘DaaS – The Complete Guide’, to hit Amazon sometime early 2020. As I go through the main offerings out there that will be in the book, regardless of my opinion about them (wait for the book…) the bottom line is simple: DaaS is far from being mainstream. And I will go one step further: it will never become mainstream until it attracts the consumer. Yes, Sally from accounting that uses a computer at home and an iPad. Or Joe on the sales team. Or your neighbor.
You may think I am insane but that is far from the truth. Reality is, a lot of technologies end up in the corporate world thanks to end users, first getting these for home use, and then pushing down the IT throat they need these at work. Most typical example of this? The iPhone many of you may be even using to read this. Started as a consumer device that had barely any ‘corporate’ capability. Sure it could access websites and send/receive emails but it stopped there.
As consumers fell in love with the device, they became widespread and next thing IT knew was they were knocking at their door to get the device supported. To read corporate email on the device. Open and edit corporate files. The rest of the story is now history.
DaaS in my particular opinion is now a niche. Compared to the amount of desktop/laptop PCs that are sold worldwide, it is indeed a tiny niche. Even though the PC shipments may be declining (all info here) it is still a lot of machines shipped. Like 260M a year. How many DaaS seats are out there today? You get the idea.
The question really becomes “Why would anyone need DaaS?”. By anyone I mean you and I. Anyone that uses a device at home. What triggered me to write this was this post on Twitter, by long-time EUC buddy Brian Madden:
He had to keep his laptop running on his car (I will not discuss the safety concerns I have about this here) as Camtasia was still rendering some video… Yes, in the cloud age, how come we do not have clones of whatever device I run, running in the cloud, where when I hit render, that cloud instance uses 1TB RAM and 128 vCPUs and I am done rendering in like 2 minutes?
Regardless of being a desktop as we know today, or another form factor (i.e. an iPad) reality is, a cloud hosted instance of whatever I have would be killer. No backups, no restores, nada. Instant access to anything, no matter if using an actual physical local device running a local instance of that or through another device accessing the cloud hosted one. And as per this example, being able to adjust the resources it sits on according to the workload and how much I want to pay or I am willing to wait. In this example, rendering something in the passenger seat of a moving vehicle, I am sure Brian would be willing to pay for that, for a 1-minute rendering vs 1-hour, especially considering his corporate VMware credit card would be the one on the hook for this one.
That is when I truly believe DaaS will take over. When it allows the Marys and Joes out there, seamlessly and completely transparent to them, to have a cloud based ‘instance’ of their devices.
What probably means ‘DaaS’ will no longer be ‘Desktop as a Service’ but in reality, ‘Device as a Service’.
Time to start planning for a new book I guess.
CR