Introducing Tehama, Teradici & IGEL (TTI) on AWS, a Technology Collaboration for Secured End-User Computing

The New Uber of VDI.

The following is a guest blog post from Jaymes Davis, Founder & Director of Product Strategy at Tehama.

With the announcement of Tehama spinning out of Pythian, we can talk about some of the technology collaborations we have been working on in the background. Those that have read my blogs or posts know, I believe the pragmatic solution for enterprises is to embrace a Hybrid architecture. This approach will become the standard over the next decade as cloud, mobile, and social continue to fuel business winners and innovators.

Within the EUC category, workspace transformation is where the enterprise is having the fastest return on investment. This investment enables the enterprise to become agile and highly competitive in today’s global economy.  Examples of DaaS or VDI being used to increase call transactions by augmenting existing call centers with freelancers or to adopt new service models with new technologies that deliver virtual desktops as or part of a service.

When adopting traditional VDI or DaaS, two core challenges are often overlooked. Luckily these challenges can now be solved:

•     High hardware costs to update an antiquated architecture where both compute and management have been centrally provisioned.
•     High software costs to replace complex and poorly integrated solutions that don’t allow for centralized administration, orchestration, security, and compliance policies.

These challenges have driven the evolution of end-user compute requirements and influenced the design and capabilities of VDI and DaaS, its complexity has also increased exponentially. This has created an inability for VDI or DS to meet critical mass in the industry of over 20% penetration in most enterprises. Over the last decade, the industry has been able to solve some of the high implementation costs associated with hardware consolidation and capability, however, only at the expense of increased complexity.

Paul Vallée, the visionary and founder behind Tehama, had a vision in the early ’90s that the workforce of the future would be global and would present challenges of complexity, security, and scale. Tehama was designed to solve the challenge of orchestrating technologies to transform the digital workplace and meet the speed of innovation that enterprises demand in today’s ever-changing business landscape.

The separation of the technology stack from the End-User leads to a reduction of “technical debt” – meaning the burdens of patch management, server hardening and hosting are now operationalized at a cost or what’s generally referred to as TCO. Even as centralized compute versus distributed compute still provided the best TCO and ROI, it still didn’t address the physical control issues that arose from a distributed compute model that larger retailers, franchises, law firms, dealerships, and financial firms have to take into consideration. Hence VDI was unable to penetrate more than 20% of the enterprise desktop.

Recognizing the need for this secured technology stack addresses one side of the problem, however, the TCO has two critical parts to manage. The first part is the time to implement and the second part is time to value where distributed compute becomes cost-effective for the organization. As the number of users per hardware unit increased, so did the implementation costs for virtual desktops. Time to implement takes as long as six weeks to eight weeks based on complexity and time to value could be another six to eight weeks based on users and solution adoption. The only way to bridge this gap is to effectively address TCO from time to implement, and time to value, with something that can help business professionals get to productivity faster.

This is the challenge Tehama, Teradici, IGEL, and AWS teamed up to solve with the new technology collaboration of TTI on AWS. I’m proud to introduce our TTI on AWS Technology Collaboration based on a secured endpoint connecting to a cloud-hosted Tehama Room. Leveraging a “Uber-like approach” to End User Computing helps solve these two significant problems that we have identified as barriers for VDI and DaaS adoption and workspace transformation.

The TTI on AWS Technology stack is delivered via tightly coupled software from the Cloud. Tehama builds a “Room” for the workloads that support the many combinations of Graphical and Task-Specific workloads that give the best consolidation and capabilities at the lowest price. Tehama takes into consideration time to value by creating a drop-in appliance that securely communicates back to the Room from your enterprise network segment or Cloud resource.  Tehama Rooms are configured and ready to deploy desktops based on Windows and Linux within minutes. All while skipping the weeks of deployment or configuration or planning for traditional VDI or DaaS.

Tehama’s partnership with IGEL delivers Amazon WorkSpaces that come with a Windows desktop experience via the Teradici PCoIP software client. Teradici PC-over-IP (PCoIP) technology delivers a secure, high-definition and highly responsive computing experience.

With the Tehama Service Delivery Platform and an IGEL device, we have created a single-entry point to enhance your time to value with unparalleled security when compared against your traditional desktop or your DIY VDI projects.

Tehama’s Technology Collaboration focuses on these business outcomes:

Global Contractors and Outsourcing: Companies looking to outsource development while retaining close control of their data and source code can use Tehama to present developers with a fully functional desktop capable of installing development tools and rebooting without affecting other users.

Executive Travel Abroad: Many Executives traveling abroad are looking to reduce the time through immigration and national firewalls. Tehama is a utility-based desktop that persists for the executive and is secure from end-to-end via any device. Executives can travel without a physical laptop and boot from an IGEL device to load a secured Tehama Room and access their persistent desktop without risk of man-in-the-middle attacks or having their laptops stolen or compromised by malicious state or third-party actors.  (IGEL’s UD Pocket is a micro-thin client – about the size of 5-10 paper clips – that can be plugged into any 64-bit x86 device with 2 or more Gbytes of RAM to convert that device into a secure IGEL OS-powered endpoint.)

Extending PC Lifecycle Windows 7 EOS: Companies facing a PC upgrade cycle or Windows 7 EOS (End of Support) deployment of a significant operating system upgrade should instead migrate to a Tehama Windows 7 Virtual desktop computing model, redeploying existing PCs as Thin Client access devices leveraging IGEL.

Enterprise Desktop Replacement: Companies seeking to escape the constraints of legacy desktop computing and move towards utility computing will benefit from more advanced desktop virtualization configurations with dynamic provisioning and personalization of the virtual desktop made available to stateless user access devices.

Pandemic Planning: New mandates in nearly every industry require preparedness for pandemic scenarios also known as disaster recovery. Tehama provides the needed assurance that existing desktop application suites are deployable in a Tehama Room without the need for expensive VDI hardware sitting on the remote site vs. a Tehama gateway attached to a Room ready to provision desktops for users immediately upon evacuation notice.

Unifying IT Strategy: Companies that have already invested in virtualization strategies in the data center and are seeking to unify desktop and cloud processes have an opportunity to leverage Cloud and client-side computing loads across a common platform. Simplified disaster recovery, enhanced data security, and reduced risk can result from such consolidation.

Desktops Sandboxing Requirements: Companies needing to introduce a demanding new application that strains current PC hardware might elect to deploy the new app as a link from the native desktop to a VDI session. This offloads CPU demands from the local desktop, both extending the PC lifespan and ensuring the adequate performance of the new application. Tehama also allows for rapid application testing and assessment with consistent desktop images.

HPC or Graphical Desktops: This allows a Virtual desktop that needs to crunch numbers or provide stunning graphics resources from the platform to provision out those specific user’s desktop without having to upgrade the server compute environment.

Tehama is the foundation for your transition into delivering a technology stack based on building out a secured workspace transformation. The TTI on AWS technology Collaboration can provide Enterprise Speed and Redundancy in a private cloud to a hybrid cloud. More importantly, supporting a TTI on AWS is a “day one” value conversation for SME (Small to Medium Enterprise). This new “Uber-like” experience enables enterprises to build desktops on-demand, so delivering virtualization as a utility. The Tehama Service Delivery Platform significantly reduces the TCO, ergo increasing the addressable market for virtual desktops.

The progression up the Gartner “Slope of Enlightenment” is anything but subtle for the innovations necessary to make desktop virtualization gain this traction. The Tehama Service Delivery Platform and TTI on AWS Collaboration ushers in this new era of workspace management for the future of work capabilities to reduce the cost of EUC as well as the acceptance rate. This technology innovation will lower the technical debt or TCO of DaaS/VDI and increase the business value of desktop virtualization to achieve a significantly higher share of the enterprise desktop.