In August, DaaS provider independenceIT (iIT) revamped its leadership team. This week, the company announced a round of equity funding that will drive the firm’s channel program and boost its DaaS technology.
Driving the investment, whose amount wasn’t disclosed, was Jose A. Segrera, who gained cloud chops as CFO for Terramark.
“For small and medium business today, the challenge of empowering workers by facilitating a bring-your-own-device strategy while maintaining data security and managing compliance and disaster recovery risks is daunting. iIT’s Cloud Workspace allows a business owner to check all these boxes with a market-proven solution, and realize the cost savings and greater agility of a cloud-enabled platform,” Segrera said. “The ability for iIT to solve these problems for the SMB owner in a cost-effective manner and the strength and experience of the leadership team is what attracted me to the company.”
The DaaS market is particularly hot. The 451 Research Group says DaaS interest is “at a fever pitch,” and Gartner sees a nearly $3 billion market emerging as the chart below indicates. The VDI portion of this DaaS market, where Amazon is participating, is clearly on the move. TechNavio believes the worldwide market for cloud-based VDI will grow at a 30.6 percent CAGR over the next three years, in large part because IT wants to lower the costs of desktop infrastructure, as well as the growth of handheld devices.
Revamped Team
This summer iIT recast its leadership team, making Jim Lippie CEO, and Seth Bostock president. Lippie leaped from executive VP of business development and Bostock rose from executive VP of corporate development.
Lippie has some serious MSP chops, having been CEO of Thrive Networks, a service provider he helped sell to Staples.
The iIT DaaS tool is Cloud Workspace. Last week Amazon announced its own DaaS service WorkSpaces. The service and name were so similar, this writer openly wondered if Amazon was rebranding tech from iIT.
Seth Bostock this week up cleared up the confusion: “iIT is not behind the Amazon DaaS solution. Providers like Amazon and VMware are waking up to the power and potential of desktop-as-a-service. iIT, as pioneers of the workspace concept, our own Cloud Workspace solution provides more than simply a desktop in the cloud - the DaaS revolution is really about empowering employee mobility and productivity in the BYOD era while ensuring data security and adherence to compliance requirements. It’s about providing a better desktop experience than the traditional local solution, not merely a remote one.”
Edited by
Blaise McNamee
