Dan Cordingley:
Several years ago, my co-founders Dave, Maher, Ken and I were looking for a really tough problem to solve - and hopefully one that was interesting enough start a new company around. Like any good start-up, it had to represent not only a difficult technical problem, but also had to solve a big pain point that customers and end-users would love to see solved. And of course it helped necessary things like financing if there happened to be a huge potential market for it.
After looking at several opportunities in several different markets, everything from consumer electronics to wireless to storage, we noticed that many large IT organizations were struggling with the problem of the desktop PC. No question it was powerful. And it provided a fantastic user experience with great graphics, video and multimedia. And was used by virtually every employee in every company around the world.
However many IT organizations in different vertical industries were really struggling with the desktop PC. As security threats increased, and wide ranging compliance legislation was mandated, the ability to ensure corporate PC’s could be managed and secured was now a huge issue. It was also time consuming. It was also expensive.
The obvious answer was centralization. If everything is placed back in the secure data center, all under IT control, everything suddenly becomes much easier to manage, secure and ensure compliance to. In fact servers had enjoyed this luxury for some time - so why not do the same thing for the Enterprise PC. Shouldn’t the PC get the same benefits as servers - things like storage networks, blades, and virtualization?
Just one problem. The user is still at their desk. And we as users do not want anything other then the latest and greatest desktop experience. High resolution displays. High definition audio. Any type of USB device. Multiple monitors. Any application. No compromises!
And this is where PC-over-IP and Teradici was born.
What if we could develop a chip that for the first time let users and computers be separated by an IP network?
Where the operating system and applications ran just as they would on a standard PC workstation.
Where the user - even a high end workstation user - could not tell that the PC was no longer under their desk.
And everything - from display resolution to the type of USB devices able to connect - was completely under IT control. Everything or nothing, depending on the user using the system.
For the first time ever - a completely uncompromised user experience with the all of the benefits of complete centralization.
All this, and more, has been realized in the intervening years. Today, PC-over-IP exists in software and hardware implementations, has been integrated in a wide variety of products, and plays an important role in the IT infrastructure of some of the most prestigious enterprises around the world.
