Nuvestack: Who are we? What do we do? And how are we making DaaS different?

Posted on February 18, 2015

By Dave Turcotte, CEO

As CEO of a company that most people haven’t heard of – yet – I spend a lot of time answering questions about who Nuvestack is and what Nuvestack does.

The questions make sense because Virtualized IT and Desktop as a Service, or DaaS, which is our area of expertise, is beginning to get market traction but it has a reputation for being complex, confusing, expensive and badly supported, if it is supported at all.

We, however, are changing all that. We’re proving DaaS can succeed – and that people and businesses want to use it to get out of IT management.

How does DaaS make a difference for users?

Nuvestack offers a fully loaded, fully supported, fully managed desktop that delivers what everyone already uses on their business computers. Only with Nuvestack, we make DaaS better because the desktop applications that are normally running resident on a PC – Microsoft Office, internet browsers, Salesforce, databases, anything – run instead on our specially configured servers. Most users neither have nor will ever see their applications work as quickly as they do on a Nuvestack desktop.

It works like this: users log into Nuvestack’s desktop using any end point or mobile device, and their desktop appears with all the apps they’re used to running. Only instead of those apps taking up disc space or gobbling up local processing speed and resources, they’re running on lightning-fast servers hosted in the Cloud. To the user, though, the only noticeable difference is that everything is faster, more secure, and more accessible. Otherwise, it’s business as usual.

Even better still, because the user’s Nuvestack desktop is available anywhere and anytime, you get this performance everywhere (you should see the spreadsheets I put together last time I went surfing), regardless of the type of computer, smartphone or tablet the user is on. Plus, the experience is remarkably similar across all these platforms.

I’ve been known to show off by running our Nuvestack desktops on really old Windows XP computers and early versions of the iPad and getting incredible performance. When people see how fast the apps move, they are amazed at what we make possible. Local hardware just doesn’t really matter so much anymore.

What does DaaS from Nuvestack mean for IT teams?

Nuvestack desktop is sold only one way: fully managed and fully supported. We handle all user requests and app support. Users get a specially configured set of applications and settings selected by the customer’s IT department.

For our customers, this eliminates a key IT expense – and for IT departments, their time is freed up to work on the really important stuff they were trying to get to when they were sidetracked because Janice’s computer froze, eight new machines were requested by marketing, accounting needed a software upgrade … you get the idea.

For companies grappling with the issue of employees using their own devices at work, we make it easy to secure these devices, too. Since Nuvestack’s desktop is running on Nuvestack servers and not the employee’s device, employees CAN log in safely through their iPad or Android and do real work, accessing their files and apps as normal. But corporate data security remains in place on the Nuvestack server and lost laptops or mobile devices don’t mean lost data.

How does Nuvestack’s DaaS make a difference for the CEO, CFO and international offices, too?

We make Nuvestack as easy to get as it is to use. We sell a complete desktop for under $100 per seat per month including support (no one else does this!) management tools and a suite of applications. Note that I said “per seat” not “per user” – this is key because you only pay for what you use, and you can reuse the seats across time zones. So, when North America is closed, your seats can be active for your teams in Europe and Asia. That can save international firms serious money. Needless to say, global call centers love us.

And, BTW, what does Nuvestack mean?

There is one more question I get that I haven’t covered yet: what does “Nuvestack” mean? The name itself has Spanish and English roots – new, cloud and stack all influenced the name we chose. But to us, and hopefully soon to the rest of the world, Nuvestack simply means the very best desktop-as-a-service around.