So I have a start up company what provides cloud software to any device. You can log in to it on any platform and use the software in your web browser. We are able to stream virtually any program to your web browser including a full desktop. Windows 10 cloud provides a thread as I am currently trying to get into the education space to lower education software and hardware cost across the nation. The way it works is based in our servers being on location and we maintain the server's and the software you just pay a small price for support and you pay a license fee to use that we pay to the companies that are charging to have their software streamed (Microsoft office, Siemens nx 11).
I am worried because I am just a small player in the market trying to change the market away from Windows and toward a hands off solution. I am looking for advice and selling points to convince businesses and the education market to not role out windows 10 cloud and go with our web based software.
If you are still confused on what we do. Our software takes any program and converts it to a website our servers do all of the work your phone, tables, laptop, and or desktop can connect to our site and work well.
We run things through remote frame buffers and display them in web browser. They act like remote applications. But it works very well we can run Android applications almost all Unix software as well as a fair amount of Windows programs
Well, deciding to take on Microsoft on the enterprise/cloud level is, arguably, even harder than the 'struggle' or whatever you wanna call it, that Linux has on the desktop.
In the cloud/enterprise level, any respect/love for the underdogs is basically gone, whereas on the desktop personal level, that kind of respect is gaining Linux a fair bit of popularity.
While competing against MS is a long term goal, make sure to have a lot of small goals along the way.
The goal is you will go to our website and pay a small charge a month and you will have access to any Android, chrome, Unix, and eventually win32 program at your fingertips that you can use in your web browser. If you pay the license fee for it we will remotely stream it to you and the server will always be the latest and greatest to keep performance fast.
I don't really want to compete against them directly. I will just be replacing windows machines with chrome boxes and or thin client boxes and moving to centralized computing. The only reason I brought Microsoft up is because windows 10 cloud appears to be trying to take over the education market with their chrome OS clone
Transparency, security and privacy are the main selling points, not to mention that the user experience has to be good as well.
Use open source / provide source code as much as possible. What tools are in use, what security features do you have implemented and what platforms are the servers built upon? Where are the servers located? Encrypt the containers/vm's and give the users a private key you don't see / allow them to use their own keys. By default tunnel outgoing traffic from your container/vm servers via a trusted vendor so you can't snoop users' internet traffic either. Implement automatic snapshots whenever the user ends a session, and keep a couple stored for the user to rollback say 1-5 sessions. Make use of bugbounty. Provide more performance for premiums, basic cloud stuff.
Just so happens i'm building my own private server for the exact same purpose, but if your service is good, i'll be happy to support it. I'm interested in checking it out, can you throw the link to me via pm, as advertising isn't allowed on the forums?
If your competing for contract. You need to identify specifically what makes you better for the business and how your going to support what will likely be an alien system to the organisation that's probably used Microsoft all this time.
If it costs more overall to switch they probably won't do it.
If you can keep that cost down and give them something effective an long term they probably will go for it (unless the guy deciding loves Microsoft)
1.) People don't like paying a monthly subscription to "use a computer" 2.) nobody knows how the data is stored, privacy concerns, how this data is used for advertisers, backup procedures, etc (basically anything and everything a person would worry about when moving to "the cloud") 3.) how the hardware is managed or how low level access the consumer has.
1) Businesses love it, it's why office 365 has taken off like it has. 2) Businesses don't care for the most part, as long as PPI is protected and the company has a good security posture 3) As long as it works.
sorry, I was talking from a standard consumer standpoint. I see the business implications. But I believe this is literally what a PaaS or IaaS is, which is widely available. They wouldn't be competing against Microsoft, they would be competing with such places as AWS
Yeah of course, but we have to ensure we look at it subjectively. I'd throw out that 90% of SaaS and such are directed towards businesses anyway and the consumer market is a very small part of it, so that'd be his primary target. MS is a direct competitor to AWS in several domains, but I think what the OP was getting at was the new cloud based Windows 10. The idea behind that is that schools can use inexpensive chromebooks so kids can't screw with them, and then use cloud based OS functionality of W10 for everything else.
The OP has a huge hurdle to cross but more competition is never a negative thing. With the right strategy I think he could succeed.
So the way that the software works is kinda unique. A company or school would pay us and we would set up physical servers on site in a personal on site location, but if they are totally against that we have our servers that we host and they connect to remotly. One requires good internal networking and the other requires large amounts of external bandwidth. Where this competed against XenApp is that our software is able to do everything the citrix stack can from providing a full remote desktop to invididual applications with one program and that program compiled is under 40 Meg's in size. We are working on a piece of software that will allow windows binaries to be run on Linux but the way it will do it is by spawning a Windows NT kernel and the necessary libraries and running the binary in that stack and piping the desktop session out to the user. The way our system is configured is we can take N number of servers and bond them all together as literally one large mainframe. The mainframe will automatically move users to different physical machines based on work load and it will move their sessions to different machines with less graphics over head. To get 3D hardware acceleration in a Citrix environment requires a invididual graphics card to be passed through to the virtual machine but since we are running everything on a physical level and all of the user data is stored on a zfs pool that clones it self constantly the users will not be able to harm the part of the mainframe that they are on. We can operate with 30% more speed with the reduced over head and we can use 1 graphics card to host 10,11,12,... N sessions on one machine and there is little latency due to the added users. We are currently trying to deploy the system across a entire county. If we deploy it the operating cost of the county will drop from roughly $5 million a year to under $500,000 due to the consolidation on hardware and resources. With our software a teacher can log in a start giving a lecture over the internet and open a "meeting room" session where any student with a session key (which expires after x number of minutes) can log in and watch from home, the classroom, or any where they have a internet connection. The teacher can also record lectures with the software and deploy them out to the students at a later date. This is useful for tutorials lectures and much more. The schools current citix platform requires a 1PB San which is expensive to maintain and wastful. What we have created requires at most 200TB for the most ludicrous of data storage.
If there is a server installed on site your data is kept on site we do not take any of your private data and it stays on site keeping it private and away from advertisers. We have also stripped and blocked all of the things that could be used for user data collection in order to help keep user integrity and personal safety at its peak.
If you opt to go into the cloud you have several options for data storage. Either you can choose to back up a copy of your home folder to one of the following: Google drive, OneDrive, Amazon, Dropbox, tar archive server. Or you can have it stored on our services. Your files are accessable after you log in and choose the my files option and it is a link directly to your files. You can delete files stored in there, but you are deleting a copy of the files. In login the user can choose which archive to use and if they want to take the intersection or the union of archives.
For right now we are holding all of our source code close to us in order to prevent someone with more money from taking literally a year's worth of work and running with it. But when we get a customer they get a copy of our code that they can read and question. We whole hearted support the open source software movement and free software, but we are too small to release our secret sauce without getting pumbled
If you are interested or want to learn more please message me I am looking for anyone who wants to help make this a professional tool and I really want to see this shake up the industry with citrix and Microsoft.
1.) The subscription is used to pay for server maintenance so what it does is ensure that your hardware in the sky is always the lastest and greatest which in the long run out weighs the cost of building a computer every few years. We also unfortunately have to charge subscription fees for certain software so we can pay the companies that gave us the license in order to prevent law suits. So a Siemens nx license or a mathworks MATLAB license is something that would need to be payed for through us.
2.) See my post below I believe you will be happy with my response :)
3.) If you are a software developer and need very low level access we can provide you access to most things. No user but root will be able to run shutdown, reboot, or other things. We also try and limit things that would tell the kernel it needs to shut down or terminate process x y z being run by a separate user. If you wanted to developers a game on the platform for example we would provide you with certain requirements it needs to meet and you could write the entire game in C if you wanted to and you would have direct access to the video card and all hardware. Our software will auto migrate users with heavy data usage either to another box with more resources or it will migrate other users with lower usage away from that user. If the entire system is very heavily used then it will begin adjusting your niceness level to even out the usage.
Our specifications are very simple and not very restrictive. It contains things like hey if you need to use this library please call this one instead for better performance (we like using standard libraries) or having the ability to change the display variable and things like that.
The way we do software distribution is not through the package manager on the system we actually compile most software ourselves and give it our own start up scripts and things so it is the most highly optimized for the system. All software is also stored on a nfs to prevent waste.
