85% of our business is coming from cloud-based desktops: Anunta founder Ananda Mukerji | Economic Times

Chennai: "Two years back, maybe 10% of our business came from cloud-based desktops. Today, it is about 85% of our business coming from cloud-based desktops," said Ananda Mukerji, Founder and Chairman of Anunta.He said virtual desktops are inherently superior to PCs and that they are more secure because the data no longer sits at employees’ desks and rather is stored in a virtually secured environment."The environment is fully managed and can be controlled manually. So, the CIO of a company also knows the environment at every endpoint in the company, which is simply not possible in the traditional environment. So, security and better manageability and total cost ownership basis, virtual desktop is a much better proposition than virtual desktops," Ananda said.With the pandemic and the wave of remote working taking over, he said that VDI (Virtual Desktop Interface) is the best technology to deliver remote work experience. And given that enterprises have started using cloud heavily, the best way to take their solutions to remote virtual desktops, is DaaS. DaaS is fully managed desktops sitting at different locations."Even before Covid, DaaS was growing faster than it is now in other forms of virtual desktops, which is non-cloud virtual desktops. In the last year, two things have happened. The industry that is really dominated by VMware and Citrix entered with their windows virtual desktops, which really changed the market. Covid has accelerated the need for enterprises to cater to a remote workforce and still require core applications to function effectively from the home environment," he said.Ananda said the company has been growing by 40-50 percent annually in the last few years and has expanded operations from Mumbai, Chennai, and Bengaluru to a small operation centre in Delhi and a presence in the US."We currently manage 200,000 remote desktops at this point. We have implemented over 1000 different used cases. We have a lot of experience in managing and implementing these technologies. We are a very close partner to the top three OEMs and have about 35 customers ranging from leading banks in India to large ITeS companies to large retail companies globally," he said.Anunta's offering, DesktopReady, is a fully packaged and managed desktop hosting on Azure cloud."That is something targeted at the SMBs segment. We have launched this in the US market a couple of months back and are testing it in India right now," he said while saying the SMB market is virgin territory and that there is a lot of potential for growth in the segment.