But you're right, there's no reason why there can't be more players in this space, specially ones who tie everything together into an easy to use package.
Aaroona: Sounds like a great idea. I have someone who frequently breaks/replaces their laptop.
One question I do have is how would migrations be handled? i.e. Windows 7 to 8. Is there a migration path at all, or do I have to start fresh for that kind of move?
It'd most likely be Windows Server something (like 2012) made to look like windows 7/8.
See: http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/
You'd get any updates pushed out by Windows update but for major releases virtual desktop make it pretty easy to just provision a new machine and mount the old drive to copy over any files you need.
Unless you go with some sort of citrix-like virtual desktop sync across devices however I haven't found any product out there that does it really well in this sort of context.
nathan: I would be thinking about what your moat is that makes it hard for someone else with more scale to come in and undercut you as part of your business plan if you go ahead with this
you can imagine a Telco or various other cloud providers getting into a business like this
The scale is already there in using existing service providers, this service would just be providing the glue to tie these services together to make it simple for SMEs / individuals.
There's heaps of potential i reckon, if you can identify a target market and a way to show them how it improves their business. You might also want to be careful about what uptime the datacentre can provide; theres few Tier III data centres in NZ but it might be cheaper to run a failover arrangement between two separate data centres or even have a small chassis somewhere (at least on a separate part of the power grid) as a disaster-recovery site. The telco you use for VoIP should also have similar arrangements and, if not in the same facility, probably need diverse links from their data centre to yours.
Can't see much potential in a commercial software package though. I think the successful business model would be in building a service model and selling the service, possibly renting the box if the customer wants it hosted internally. If you don't use Asterisk then there will be a perception that you could. Either way, a service model is your competitive advantage against the name-brand hardware manufacturers also trying to break into this market.
In some ways unified comms approaches a telco business and could appear threatening to them, so you probably want to be working with a telco/ISP instead of against them.
But you're right, there's no reason why there can't be more players in this space, specially ones who tie everything together into an easy to use package.
Yes being easy to use could be the biggest selling point, but has to be reliable and secure so i can't see it growing too big on windows. A web front end is probably the way to do that whatever platform its on. Vmware or Xen are probably giving you the flexibility to host the service wherever you need while preventing you from getting locked into a specific data centre. Hosting is expensive too though, it won't be cheap to run so you need a few really loyal customers to cover the fixed costs.
Funnily enough I just got my Amazon Workspaces Preview invite sent through this morning partway through the migration of my workstation from a regular AWS EC2 to a dedicated server / VMware..
If I was going to do it I'd wouldn't try to re-invent the wheel straight away. I'd be using the existing services but providing the unified setup, support & billing.
But you're right, there's no reason why there can't be more players in this space, specially ones who tie everything together into an easy to use package.
Yes being easy to use could be the biggest selling point, but has to be reliable and secure so i can't see it growing too big on windows. A web front end is probably the way to do that whatever platform its on. Vmware or Xen are probably giving you the flexibility to host the service wherever you need while preventing you from getting locked into a specific data centre. Hosting is expensive too though, it won't be cheap to run so you need a few really loyal customers to cover the fixed costs.
My 2c. Windows is reliable and secure and if its a Virtual Desktop needing Windows apps you need Windows. Not sure what is meant by not growing too big on windows.
Hyper-V has more sockets installed that Xen and its free, so easy to move around
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