Virtual desktops thrive in the cloud

Whether you trust in home or heaven depends on where your customer wants their applications to live in a virtualised data centre or the cloud, writes Sholto Macpherson

BlueFire has been dealing in virtual desktops for five years but a question that faces the Sydney reseller applies to the IT industry generally and that is to decide between the cloud and more established managed services.

For instance, Chromebooks, notebooks from Acer and Samsung running Google’s Chrome operating system, run popular applications such as Gmail in the cloud at the ad-search giant’s data centres around the world and delivered through the browser. And the success of Salesforce.com software for keeping track of sales leads and clients delivered as a service is a headwind to software makers that stream such applications from their customers’ data centres.

BlueFire chief information officer Jason Serda says there's money in making IT easier for small business customers through the use of virtual desktops.

"They are are not interested in complexity. They’ve heard every story in the book and they just want something that works,” Serda says.

Since Dimension Data bought BlueFire two years ago, the managed-services provider has expanded to seven data centres in Australia and New Zealand and Asia.

BlueFire sells service providers hardware, software, training manuals, brochures, services and collateral to sell their own cloud services for desktop virtualisation.

Two recent wins are Amcom Telecom in WA and Bharat Sanchar Nigam, an Indian Government telecommunications company. Six deals are in the wings, Serda says.