How a Leading Cloud Storage and Services Provider Enhanced DaaS Application Provisioning via Cloudpaging

Enabling Easy and Flexible Application Management for DaaS

Client Background

The customer is a leading cloud technology provider who sought to modernize application delivery for its desktop as a service (DaaS) solution. Applications needed to be made available to more than 100,000 users around the world, while maintaining a customizable user experience.

The Problem: Managing Applications for 100,000s of Virtual Desktops

A leading cloud storage and services provider delivers a fast, flexible, and secure way for its user base to deploy and manage applications for its Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform. The DaaS platform accelerates software deployment, upgrades, patching, and retirement by “cloudifying” Microsoft® Windows® desktop applications into virtualized application packages. These applications run on the customer’s DaaS platform instance as though they are natively installed. The platform allows its primary admin users to install their own applications, or purchase desktop applications through its online application software store, and deploy them to multiple end-users on the account, while maintaining control of the users’ access to those applications. Simple, pay-as-you-go, user-based pricing ensures that customers only pay for the applications that are being used.

But it wasn’t always this way. This particular organization first built its DaaS platform to offer a “Desktop in the Cloud” for its customers. The company quickly realized providing the desktop was only going to solve a portion of the customer needs.

Customers had a clear need for Application Lifecyle Management in the DaaS platform. Compounding the problem was the fact that each customer likely had different policies, requirements, and expectations for Application Lifecycle Management meaning a “one size fits all” solution would not work. Customers would expect the same level of performance from their applications on the DaaS platform as they did from their physical desktops. They would also need compatibility with all Windows applications whether they bought the software from the cloud provider, installed their own application, also known as Bring Your Own Application (BYOA), or used a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model.

The organization needed to address all these concerns while addressing its own set of requirements. Scaling and performance were critical, as this solution would be utilized by thousands of users on a daily basis. Reducing storage requirements would provide significant benefits to both the leading cloud storage and services provider and the pricing for its customers. Automation to significantly cut down on manual efforts was needed to help ensure the company’s solution would be cost-effective. The automated features would need to integrate seamlessly with the existing application store. Application usage data would be needed for billing as well as the ability to deploy, update, and remove software.

The Solution: Only Cloudpaging Could Address All Their Requirements

The organization found Numecent’s Cloudpaging technology to be the only out-of-the-box solution that could meet all their DaaS requirements. Cloudpaging also contained additional features beyond the company’s requirements that added additional value and eliminated other potential custom work for the company’s team.

Cloudpaging provides excellent Application Lifecyle Management with a Software Asset Management model that can be fully integrated with and extended by application stores. Applications can be easily packaged, deployed, updated, and removed without leaving a trace. A deployed application runs natively within the DaaS platform instance; the performance is the same as a natively installed application. Proprietary Cloudpaging technology reduces application footprints to less than 10% of the space occupied by a native installation. This significantly reduces storage and network requirement costs both for the customer and for the DaaS provider.

Sample Applications	Traditional Install Size (MB)	Cloudpaging Prefetch Payload (MB)	Reduced Traffic and Storage (MB)	Annual Cost Savings for 100,000 Desktops ($0.10/GB)*
Act! Pro	304	124	180	$21,552
Anime Studio Pro	284	37	247	$29,688
Autodesk Revit	10,291	748	9,543	$1,145,160
Corel Draw	428	161	267	$32,088
Microsoft Visio Professional	1,114	41	1,073	$128,712
SolidWorks	2,703	438	2,265	$271,800
Sophos Endpoint Security	467	4	463	$55,536
Turbo CAD	667	60	607	$72,864
Visual Studio Ultimate	4,560	247	4,313	$517,560
WordPerfect Office	983	84	899	$107,856

Cloudpaging also includes a full featured set of APIs allowing the leading cloud storage and services provider to easily automate all application activities on both the Client and Server side as well as seamlessly integrate into the existing DaaS console. This allowed further integration with the company’s additional services including Active Directory connections to provision applications to specific users. The flexible architecture and billing options also allow the leading cloud storage and services provider to fully track application usage, centrally manage applications, and offer pricing models that are based on actual usage. Customers love receiving one clear and concise bill from a single provider for all their DaaS and application usage.

The Benefits

The combination of Numecent’s Cloudpaging Technology with the organization’s DaaS platform has created a solution that provides the best of breed offerings within the DaaS market. The company is able to provide an automated platform for users to select from hundreds of applications it provides for free or at a cost, as well as easily facilitate BYOL and BYOA applications. Each customer can mix and match applications from all three categories to curate a unique experience for their user base and provide a custom application store experience. Applications added via the organization’s application store are available for use almost instantly.

Cloudpaging has an extensible digital rights management component that allow entitlement, provisioning, and upgrades to be centrally controlled and extended upon by using a set of Web API’s by system integrators. The company’s DaaS platform enables Microsoft Windows applications to be packaged and deployed to users throughout any customer’s organization. Cloudpaging allowed the company to build and manage an application catalog of third party applications that includes already owned licenses, internally developed custom applications, and applications purchased through its online store for desktop applications by leveraging these API’s. This has resulted in the added benefit of becoming an additional revenue center for the company.

Conclusion

The organization’s DaaS platform’s simple monthly, per-user pricing eliminates the need for up-front investments in software and hardware used to manage and deploy applications, and reduces operational expenses involved with managing applications. “We’re pleased to know that Numecent’s Cloudpaging solution surpassed the DaaS requirements for this global industry leader of cloud storage and services,” Arthur Hitomi, CEO of Numecent stated. “No other solution can deliver a virtualized application with the native desktop experience as delivered by Cloudpaging.”