Why Workspot? My Thoughts On the Enterprise Desktop Cloud

Workspot is a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) software company founded by my good friend and former Citrix colleague, Amitabh Sinha. The company offers a SaaS product called The Enterprise Desktop Cloud, that helps companies rapidly, securely and economically provide enterprise desktops as a service to any device across the globe. This is tremendously exciting because Workspot is the End User Computing Utility that Nicholas Carr described in his book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (highly recommended).

Today, Workspot announced that I’ve joined its board of directors and, given my many years at Citrix, some may ask “why?”

The release of this kind of end-user computing utility — Workspot’s Enterprise Desktop Cloud — is timely especially in the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times in which we live. The pandemic has become a massive accelerant to many enterprises’ cloud transformation efforts, as companies seek ways to improve their competitiveness. Other catalysts like the need to support work from anywhere (WFX) infrastructure securely and at scale, and the need for next-generation answers to the threat of increasingly sophisticated bad actors is forcing companies to rethink the fundamental ways that they provide services to their employees and partners. That’s where Workspot comes in.

Amitabh founded Workspot with an audacious goal: to mainstream and expand the primary market for cloud-hosted desktops/apps. His idea was to build a 100% cloud-native infrastructure for delivering enterprise desktops to compete in the emerging DaaS (desktop-as-a-service) market.  The driving principles for Workspot were simplicity, security, and performance. His vision was to offer an alternative to custom-designed, hand-crafted do-it-yourself (DIY) VDI software by offering a pure SaaS model at a radically different price-point.

Visions become reality only when they increase in customer-relevance every day, or in the Wayne Gretzky vernacular “skate to where the puck is going to be.” At Citrix, we created the “Virtual Workplace” video in 2001. It became our “work is not a place” roadmap and expressed our ideas about where the future of work would go. The ideas in the video are still quite relevant — not because of the technology foretold — but rather that it focused on the human outcomes we imagined that would make a real difference, resulting in better ways to work and live.

Historically, exciting advances in computing were dependent on acquiring new generations of CPUs, networking, storage and PC operating systems. For the most part, those days are gone because we’re at the threshold of the ‘cloud-only era of IT.’ It’s an era where daily innovation in cloud compute, network and storage services are driving continuous advances in computing — and new possibilities for human outcomes.

The “consumerization of IT” (remember that?) put massive pressure on enterprise IT organizations to focus more holistically on user experiences. A “cloud-only” era allows IT to get much more focused on human outcomes that drive business growth, efficiency and agility, and much less on running enterprise infrastructure.

The higher levels of abstraction that cloud services offer leads to faster and more creative invention. Building on top of SaaS services that are 100% cloud-native is how modern enterprise infrastructure is being built today to leverage continual improvements by its ecosystem partners. Legacy approaches that impose old beliefs are just not going to cut it going forward.

The new way to build infrastructure is all about being cloud native — exactly how Workspot is architected. The Workspot Enterprise Desktop Cloud can (1) deploy globally in days and scale in minutes, (2) offer a high-performance user experience with industry-leading availability, (3) provide a unique zero-trust computing model, (4) support access using any device and (5) offer amazing end-to-end observability and performance. It was designed to be plug-compatible with traditional enterprise tools for identity, security and management. It’s been built from the ground-up as a SaaS service, offering a full range of desktops for office work, task-driven work or intensive design/engineering work across the globe in a secure, high-performance manner with compelling economics.

Workspot customers span the spectrum: from local to global enterprises that are aggressively employing digital transformation to improve their agility and market opportunities. Their stories are inspiring because they speak to the kind of business impact that bring the digital revolution to life around human outcomes, which is exactly how I’ve experienced our industry since I joined in the early 1980’s.

That’s a great reason for me to be excited about joining the board of Workspot and guide, advise and inspire the company to help create the human outcomes that make a difference in both our business and personal lives.

Learn more about Workspot’s Enterprise Desktop Cloud platform.