The year of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure(VDI) is yet to come although every year recently has been touted as the year of VDI. “Although VDI provides great value to the IT organization, previous solutions in the market have been riddled with complexity. End user experience has been questionable in a number of deployments. All of this at a higher total cost of ownership (TCO) and a relatively much higher initial investment”- remarks Ashok Prabhu, CEO of Valuepoint Techsol. This has dwarfed the great value the VDI concept brings in terms of manageability, data security and safety, flexibility and agility. Adoptions have hence been slow and limited to sectors where VDI is rather a business need.

“EnCloudEn’s vision is to take VDI to every organization in every sector by being the credible and practical alternative to the desktop. Our product priority is around three key areas: provide great end user experience; make it simple and self-managing; lower TCO and initial investment” says Abinash Saikia, Co-Founder of EnCloudEn. The company intersperses open source tools along with their own products to come up with the final solution. Built using the venerable OpenStack as the cloud management framework, Enclouden has added monitoring/alert frameworks for automatic pre-emptive problem identification and resolution. The deployments come with a high availability solution to make sure systems in production never go down, guaranteeing 99.95 percent availability. Enclouden also provides a robust application orchestration framework for easy application/OS-patch management. The same is also used to improve user experience issues caused by boot/scan/login storms, by tackling them automatically as and when they show up.

“We provide great value to our customers by enabling Linux virtual desktops along with Windows. The Linux virtual desktops come packaged with Microsoft office and other Windows applications so users can continue with their preferred productivity options” mentions Satya Kishore, Co-Founder of EnCloudEn. The solution comes with a native virtual machine access application in Windows, Linux and Android platform making access easier with any device from anywhere. The access works with the company’s existing authentication mechanisms like Active Directory or LDAP providing a secure session every time. Along with providing the options, the solution does very well in proving a great experience to the end user. Nifty features like USB redirection, audio-video bi-directionality make sure the end user feels like they are working on a native device.

EnCloudEn’s VDI solution runs on a very robust Private Cloud platform based on OpenStack. The solution works with all industry standard hypervisors such as VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen and KVM. “OpenStack provides us with the next generation ‘Software Defined Data Center’ features like ‘Software Defined Storage’ and ‘Software Defined networking’. Association with the OpenStack project makes sure the core of the solution continues to become more and more feature rich with every update”- continues Satya Kishore. Further, the company’s Cloud architecture allows the use of standard commodity hardware. The customers can start small and scale as they grow by simply adding standard Hardware. “OpenStack fuels very large data centers globally for companies such as Rackspace, HP, Paypal and Cisco. Scalability to thousands of servers is not a concern at all” added Abinash.

Partnering with companies such as IBM, ValuePoint and ITC InfoTech, the IIM Bangalore (NSRCEL) incubated company has been offering solutions across pharma, banking, education, manufacturing and technology domains. With Avant-garde solution up their sleeves, the company is out to be the best alternative for traditional computing and IT models.