This article originally appeared in the October 2010 issue of Unified Communications magazine

A company called RingCube (News - Alert) Technology Inc. recently announced vDesk, an enterprise desktop virtualization solution that aims to simplify the creation, access and management of Windows desktops through workspace virtualization. Unified Communications (News - Alert) Magazine recently spoke with Doug Dooley, vice president of product management and marketing at RingCube, to discuss vDesk and what it brings to the virtual desktop.

Give us a little history on RingCube.

Dooley: RingCube got started in 2005, originally as a consumer-based technology.

Co-founder Mike Larkin, who’s our chief technology officer, worked for IBM (News - Alert). He is an operating system expert, but he was also good in front of customers because toward the end of his career at IBM he was in IBM Global Services. He was working a lot out in the field with customers, helping them solve really complex technology deployments. His buddy, the other cofounder, Kiran Kamity, is a Stanford grad. He is also an operating system expert from network compliance.

They wanted a product to make your digital life portable and available so it didn’t matter what computer you were on. So they started building, essentially, a virtual desktop or a virtual workspace type of technology, and they happened to call it MojoPac.

How did that translate into what RingCube sells today?

Dooley: In 2008 to early 2009 we really started to make our big push out of the consumer market into the enterprise market. That’s when we launched vDesk.

In the middle of 2009 we felt like we really had the enterprise product we needed to address customers’ main concerns, and it’s been a successful run since then.

Today we sell to lots of different kinds of large enterprises.

We also have a very healthy business in the contact center. Where you see a lot of growth in the contact center business is really just a work at home model. I’ve heard T.J. Singh at Gartner (News - Alert) say that the next big offshore, or big place that’s going to happen, for call centers is your home country. It’s this idea that the call center jobs are not necessarily leaving the country that you live in; they’re staying where you are, but people are working at home and making it cost effective and attracting a high caliber talent. So that’s kind of his new use case that we’ve really been enabling our customers in the call center space to take forward.

So what exactly is vDesk?

Dooley: We have partnerships with VMware and Citrix. Those are the two big names we often get compared with in virtual desktops, but they’re actually partners of ours. We cooperate with them, and we can integrate our products with them and we have joint customers with them. But it is an alternative.

Often when people think of a virtual desktop they think of the idea of a desktop that feels like a mainframe session – you have a really thin terminal where there’s nothing really computed on the end user’s PC and everything is essentially happening server-side. That’s the classic thing that Citrix and VMwave sell.

What vDesk really brings, not just to contact center businesses but to lots of customers, is the ability to still have the benefits of centralized management and control that virtual desktops inherently provide, but to be able have maximum, full performance on the endpoint and have great mobility, so you can provision to any PC quickly. [It ensures that] you have voice and video and rich applications that run extremely well.

Typically in a traditional virtual desktop deployment, called hosted virtual desktops or VDI, those applications don’t work right. Let’s say you’re a contact center trying to do work at home and you’re trying to use a solution from Citrix or VMware for VDI, and you want voice and video training to occur. If you talk to anybody in the contact center business they’ll tell you No. 1, it’s too expensive, and No. 2, it doesn’t even work.

Those are the big challenge that we’re helping our customers overcome – you have this lightweight, full performance virtual desktop that’s highly controlled that gives you PCI compliance security on the endpoint and being able to deploy on any PC anywhere in the world.

So how is your solution packaged?

Dooley: We sell software that corporate offices would manage and deploy centrally, and then users would simply log into a Web browser, securely download this virtual desktop, and then once it launches onto your home machine it essentially transforms your home PC into a secure, locked-down, fully capable corporate PC.

Who are the target for this?

Dooley: It’s primarily large enterprise. We do have customers heavily in the financial services, some government, some health care, energy companies. But, again, we have a very healthy business in the contact center space because they discovered us.

What is the geographic target for RingCube?

Dooley: Primarily the product is localized in two languages, in English and Japanese. Yesterday we announced Granada Corp (News - Alert)., which is a bilingual call center with Spanish, is using our technology. So we can work with other languages, but primarily our focus is North America, Western Europe and Japan.

What’s your go to market?

Dooley: Our go to market is primarily channel partners. We do some deals direct, but very few.