SIMTone Puts the Silver Lining on Cloud Computing
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Cloud computing is gaining greater appeal in these difficult economic times. Many startups and small businesses are looking for ways to contain their IT costs and budget appropriately. SIMtone is aiming to help solution providers meet those budgetary needs by offering a platform that can be used to create cloud-based environments at a fixed, subscription-based price.
SIMtone differs from the rest of the market by focusing on delivering a complete desktop environment via the cloud. Most solutions on the market that fall under the cloud computing moniker are individual services built on software-as-a-service (SAAS) capabilities, which offer an individual capability, such as contact management, accounting and so on.
In other words, SIMTone focuses on providing the tools that build “PC in the cloud” capabilities, where a complete desktop environment and associated applications can be virtualized and then placed in the data center for access on any remote system, such as an Internet Café PC, netbook, notebook or traditional desktop PC.
The idea here is to remove the hardware from the equation and convert the remote system into little more than a portal to access desktops and applications. That concept will reduce hardware expenses significantly and will help companies gain better control of their applications and user environments, without introducing additional layers of management. Customers can choose to build their own internal data centers to host a “cloud” or work with a hosting service to deploy their “cloud” on leased or rented equipment, or turn completely to a subscription-based solution.
Regardless of the choice, solution providers should be able to build services around the configuration, deployment or maintenance of a SIMtone platform. What’s more, aggressive solution providers can build their own data centers and then offer to host and manage their customer’s desktops, helping those solution providers to make the transition to a managed services provider.
