If your business is considering enabling remote work, Bring Your Own Device or looking to easily provision, update and secure your users with DaaS or a virtual desktops you’re not alone. In fact, according to Gartner, DaaS momentum continues to build – especially in the midmarket.
To help businesses think through some of the major considerations of DaaS solutions, we developed a comparison guide that outlines:
- How projects get funded
- Major solution types
- Key questions to consider
- A cost evaluation process
- Thoughts on overcoming objections
So, why would should listen to us? Well, Evolve IP…
- Has been providing DaaS solutions for over 13 years
- Is the largest multi-tenant VMware DaaS provider in the United States.
- Our solution has been named in every Gartner DaaS Market Guide since inception.
- We also work with Citrix and have deployed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for clients.
- We have tens of thousands of users
Bottom line, we have a lot of experience to pull from for this comparison. Today we will look at the number one question / consideration we hear … What is the Total Cost of Ownership of Desktop-as-a-Service / DaaS?
It's critical for business and technology leaders to calculate the true return on investment for DaaS. Some users calculate the cost of DaaS by calculating the cost of laptop and the number of years that it might last for. But this methodology fails to consider the cost of managing laptops, shipping costs, costs of a lost/stolen laptop, costs incurred due to time and resources spent doing this, and most importantly the increased risk of security breach or data loss.
Apart from that the pricing model for DaaS is more or less the same for every provider. You buy a seat, then you outfit the seat with the
ancillary parts and pieces needed to actually make the desktop work. The typical seat itemization would include:
- RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) – this is a tool used to manage desktops. In our case, we use N-Able. However, we also allow customers to bring their own solutions to the table and re-use them in our cloud.
- Anti-Virus – In today’s environment you had better protect those devices. We utilize Trend AV or allow our customers to bring their own solutions.
- Operating System – Pretty straight forward. Again, if customers have their own Office 365 OS they can bring that along.
- Patching – This is not a requirement, but more and more clients are asking us to apply Windows, 3rd party and AV patches/updates. We think this is great move because there is ZERO value to the business handling this exercise and you are paying an IT professional WAY too much for such a mundane chore. Not to mention we’ve never found anyone in IT that wakes up thinking, “I can’t wait to patch my desktops today.” (If this is you, put down the whitepaper and call someone for help!)
- Management - Not every vendor provides the option to "manage" DaaS but Evolve IP does. Evolve IP frees IT from the day-to-day management of laptops, infrastructure, vendors and other administrative tasks so IT can focus on strategic initiatives.
- Media Optimization - Not every vendor has the capability to optimize real-time audio and video solutions such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex etc. but Evolve IP does. Evolve IP empowers users to collaborate and connect via video conferencing solutions within their desktop environment as seamlessly as they would outside of it.
So, how does a typical DaaS solution compare to Workspaces? Here’s a price range comparison for Vendor-Managed DaaS and Vendor-Assembled DaaS.
- Evolve-Assembled DaaS: $43 - $206 per seat per month
- Evolve-Managed DaaS: $78 - $241 per seat per month
*Discounts apply based on term and value
*Bundle required for core DaaS infrastructure. Talk to sales to learn more.
