Meet DesktopSimple - App delivery as-a-service that just makes sense

Guest post by Timothy Mukaibo - Founder DesktopSimple

It’s been said that some of the best startups and technologies are invented by a founder wishing to solve their own problem; “necessity being the mother of innovation”, and all that.

A few years ago I was a technical consultant on various large-scale Windows desktop migration projects. A little frustrated by the need to use on-premise software when these organisations were trying to develop a “Cloud-first” strategy, I began to think about how enterprise desktops could be managed “in the cloud”.

There are a few options in the marketplace, but I’ve found that most of them are extending existing on-premise offerings, and still look at systems management in a very traditional way.

So I’ve built DesktopSimple - Windows desktop management-as-a-service for the Enterprise. There’s no infrastructure to worry about, you just install the client, upload your apps, and away you go. Initially DesktopSimple is focused on application installation and management, but there’s a whole load of additional functionality on the roadmap, like smart reporting, update management and even OSD in the near future.

The act of installing an application itself is trivial; there are dozens of products in the market that can do this. But handling the upload and distribution of content in a performant way across multiple geographies is a bit harder. Most desktop management tools would require the administrator to set up a server for each geographic location (if not each office). And how about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) scenarios such as universities, where the IT department wants to provide access to department licensed software, but doesn’t have ownership of the device? DesktopSimple has some simple and innovative ways of handling these scenarios.

Thanks to BizSpark, I’ve been able to build DesktopSimple as a Cloud-native application in Azure, which has given me some fantastic platform tools such as robust messaging with Service Bus, reliable Virtual Machine infrastructure and deployment automation with Azure Automation to use as a base.

As a founder, the most exciting thing for me is that I can actually then build the product that I want to. Most enterprise software is clunky. Software engineers don’t like building it, managers don’t like buying it and users definitely don’t like using it. However, DesktopSimple isn’t governed by any of these constraints. It can be modern, it can be fun to build and not horrible to use (the benchmark for a lot of enterprise software :) ) - it just needs to be a great product to succeed. I hope you’ll take a look at desktopsimple.com and give it a go!