Last Thursday we hosted a well-attended webinar, Wazzup with WaaS?!?!?, that exposed a glaring lack of understanding of this space in the SMB Nation community. That’s okay as it signals a greenfield of opportunity for SMB Nation partners and MSPs to take advantage of. As you know, we’d rather be early than late in technology. WaaS is exactly this and then some. You can watch the webinar here.
There was a lot of context drawn out that compared WaaS to VDI, Desktop as a Service (DaaS), Citrix sessions, RDP and even GoToMyPC. Much of this dialog was fueled by audience questions (in fact, we went overtime with the questions). There were conversations about security (of course), geography, and “where” the WaaS resources live (depends on client need).
Deeper Understanding
So let me bring a bit of order to this conversation. According to Webopedia, “Workspace-as-a-Service, or WaaS, is a form of desktop virtualization that provides access to business applications and data from anywhere at any time.” Techopedia has a slightly different definition as “The term "workspace as a service" (WaaS) in IT refers to services that provide end users with a virtual workspace, which is a model of the kinds of resources end users would have at their desk within a physical office environment.” It further goes on to provide additional context as “Workspace as a service is part of a greater category of services often called "software as a service" (SaaS), where vendors deliver services through the Web, instead of sending client software on digital storage media.”
The research firm MarketsandMarkets calculated that the WaaS market will exceed $9.41B by 2019. Notably it’s observations are “… a major force driving this market is the increasing adoption of BYOD in various organizations. The low costs and easy management have led Workspace as a Service solutions and services to the increasing adoption by enterprises and small and medium businesses (SMBs) around the world. The demand for working from anywhere, anytime, using own mobile devices by employees is increasing rapidly.”
Next Steps
First – watch the WaaZ webinar replay by selecting it from our SMB Nation webinar page. It’s an amazing 60-minute investment of time that you will leave richer than when you arrived.
Second – get to know Northbridge Secure. This established Australian-based ISV is entering the US market as I write these words with its NetConnect WaaS solution for the SMB market. Discover more here.