MSP News

Desktop Management Made Easy and Profitable for MSPs and Cloud Providers

By Mae Kowalke
MSPNews™ Contributor

Many managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud service providers are interested in entering the desktop management market, but do not see a way to profitably do so. The overhead needed for management and support seems unwieldy.

At least, it has been until now. Enter Wanova, a company that’s developed a turnkey desktop cloud solution geared toward just this market.

In a recent MSPNews™ video interview, Barry Phillips Wanova’s chief marketing officer, described the solution, Mirage, as being an integrated platform capable of handling everything from image and patch management to complete data recovery for entire machines, to Windows 7 migration and hardware refreshes, to software and hardware asset reporting.

“Mirage allows MSPs to have integrated break-fix in their product,” Phillips explained. “They can do everything centrally instead of sending people to site. MSPs get the ability to centrally manage desktops, and users get the ability to use real PCs.”

Essentially, what Wanova has done is take the concept of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)—bringing everything into the network operations center for management—and apply it to desktop management.

This approach has three distinct advantages for MSPs and cloud providers looking to break into the desktop management market.

First, it opens up new revenue streams by enabling many new services to be managed using a single platform.

Second, it is a centrally cloud-managed solution, with layering, for desktop image management. Base images on a PC can be replaced while leaving the rest of the machine untouched. Remote fixes are very efficiency: the image is rolled back to the last known snapshot, and only what’s needed for repair is pushed off to the user.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Mirage makes desktop management profitable for MSPs.

So what’s next for desktop management? Phillips predicts tablet computers are the next frontier. This, he expects, will means a combination of managing data on the actual tablet itself, and using the table as a means to access data on PCs.

For more discussion about opportunities in the desktop management market, watch the full video interview below.

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