Will Poole, Co-chairman of the Board, NComputing, talked to Prashant L Rao about its play in the education sector, BYOD and how the vendor was going to help reduce the cost of desktop virtualization
It’s because of the unique needs of the education sector of looking not only at low CAPEX but also low OPEX, which means low energy costs. If you are running 5,000 schools in AP, which have deployed NComputing equipment, you care a lot about the fact that each user requires only one watt on the station plus a share of the PC. When the power is delivered in diesel on the back of a motorbike to a generator supplied by a government contractor or an NGO, you need to save everything that you can. The second reason is simply value for money. We can deliver that by making use of computing resources in a more efficient way.
If you are as budget constrained as schools tend to be, you have to look for creative solutions. They are driven by bids. The government says give me the price for 5,000 schools with 22 machines per school. The parties that bid find that they can be more competitive if they use shared computing.
It works for everything from a rural school all the way to one of the largest enterprises in this country that’s looking at reducing the energy and cost of desktop computing while adding more value to employees who work from different facilities on different days by giving them the same desktop. We can do that with a virtual desktop environment. A virtual desktop is valuable to enterprises in terms of centralized control of resources and in delivering better service to users.
How does BYOD fit into your strategy?
BYOD fits directly into our evolved strategy where we are looking to shift from being a device-centric company to one centered around software. Our vSpace client enables older machines that don’t have the horsepower to run the latest OS or apps to run them off a newer shared PC. The second thing is that you can load it onto a laptop and get a mobile computing desktop that accesses apps in your private Cloud. The likely next candidate for us would be an Android-based tablet.
The vSpace management console addresses device level management needs. Updating firmware is easy. We also connect into existing enterprise management systems and bring our devices into the same view.
Do you see Desktop-as-a-Service offerings taking off?
Cloud-based distribution of virtual desktops will happen but the infrastructure isn’t quite ready in India. You have to have to have continual, reliable bandwidth. If it drops for five minutes, then your productivity goes to zero. Some large enterprises have high quality connectivity between their data centers and each of their corporate offices. In that scenario, with a private Cloud, virtual desktop distribution works fine and we are playing in that area.
How is your partnership with Citrix in the desktop virtualization space going?
Companies that have been early adopters of desktop virtualization are often customers of Citrix. So we have teamed up with them to support the HDX protocol, which is their flagship, top-of-the-line endpoint solution. From a software perspective, we are supporting them on a SoC architecture. We first shipped SoC about two years back in the L300. Now we have taken the third generation of the Numo technology and put it in a device that runs Citrix HDX software—the N400 & N500. Those will ship later this quarter. The exciting thing about the N400 in particular is that we have broken the price barrier. In volume, the US price will be under $100 per endpoint. No other company comes close to that.
You do have to look at the entire cost of the stack—the Citrix software, licenses etc. Nevertheless, we have taken a big chunk of the cost out while delivering a high quality experience and a management experience that works well.
This is a large enterprise play. Citrix has a VDI-in-a-box product that comes down to the mid-market. That’s also a viable place for us to go with them. Traditionally, however, their sweet spot has been in the large enterprise.
With low-cost devices, vSpace client software and now the Citrix endpoints, we have the broadest range of products. We have a big growth year ahead of us and have shipped more products in the first half of this year than ever before.
Tell us about some of your deployments in India.
The ESIC deployment is still unmatched in terms of scale. We expect to see more deals of that scale with the N400/500 shipping. We continue to win government bids for schools. We have a strong partner in Redington. We work with NIIT, Everonn and Educomp for the large bids in education. They do everything from preparing the computer lab, getting network connectivity, training the IT specialist in the school, getting content etc.
Something like this, where you have a bid that gets issued for 5,000 schools and six months later they are deployed, couldn’t happen in the US.