Putting The Cloud in simpler terms

I’ve heard a lot of people over the last few weeks ask what The Cloud is. Many organizations say they’re all about The Cloud; analysts say that The Cloud is the Next Big Thing. Suddenly, so many companies are suddenly on The Cloud that it’s ridiculous.

Sure, it's pretty, but what exactly is The Cloud?

So what is The Cloud, and what does it mean for the average business? The technical folks at visionapp may cringe at the oversimplification, but as I see it, The Cloud is basically when a task the user performs is performed over the Internet instead of a local computer. Implementing the task can be started on one’s workstation using a client (Skype is an example of this) or a web-based interface (such as everybody’s favorite SaaS example, Salesforce). The computations, though, are not done on that user’s workstation or in the user’s company’s server room; from the user’s perspective, it’s done “over the Internet.”

In reality, of course, the processing is done (most often) on the software vendor’s own servers in the vendor’s data center. This makes a lot of sense when the task that you want to do requires a large investment on your part. For instance, part of Salesforce’s success is that the in-house resources needed for a CRM system are huge, and it’s much easier to pay $50 a month per user and start today than $10,000 or more to start a CRM project that may not be ready for a few months.

visionapp is actually doing a lot of this today, especially in Europe, with technology based on its visionapp Workspace Management platform. One of the largest telecommunications companies in the world are hosting business applications over The Cloud using visionapp technology. And the telecommunication company’s customers are seeing a much lower initial investment, lower requirements for their own workstations, and lower maintenance costs — adding up to a lower cost of ownership and lower operating expenses.

Want to use another protocol in vRD 2009?

vRD 2009 has added support for many more protocols in addition to RDP (including VNC, Citrix ICA, Telnet, SSH, and HTTP/S). If you want to use another protocol–no matter what the default protocol is for the object–follow these directions.

Choose another protocol for a connection.

To connect via a different protocol, select the connection, then right–click. Next, select Connect with Protocols…, and choose the protocol you want to use.

Go to the vRD 2009 site and click Try Out to download the evaluation version today!

Shortcuts in vRD 2009

If you’ve begun to use visionapp Remote Desktop 2009, there are a few shortcuts to some of the new functionality!

To quickly refresh sessions and find out who is connected to any/all of the computers in a folder, right-click on the folder and select Refresh Sessions All.

Organize the contents of folders by choosing the folder, then right–click and select Sort Alphabetically.

Since vRD 2009 can now support a lot more protocols than just RDP (including VNC, Citrix ICA, Telnet, SSH, and HTTP/S), how do you figure out which protocol each connection uses? Easy — just hover over a connection to see which protocol it will use by default!

Go to the vRD 2009 site and click Try Out to download the evaluation version today!

vRD 2009 Intro Video now online!

The vRD team at visionapp has created an introductory video for our new vRD 2009. It’s about 5 minutes long — if you’d like a quick intro on how the visionapp Remote Desktop 2009 software works, click play!

Or if you want to see it in high-res, watch the Flash video on our site.

Let us know what you think!

vRD 2009 released today!

visionapp Remote Desktop 2009

Today, visionapp released Remote Desktop 2009. If you’ve played with the older versions, you know that it was a tool to make managing RDP connection easier. The 2009 version supports RDP like the old versions, and adds support for Citrix ICA, VNC, SSH, Telnet, and HTTP/HTTPS.

Of course we’d love it if you wanted to review the software. Let me know if you want a license for the full version – you can download the 30-day eval from our website.

The full press release can be found here.