Giving up the desktop…

I just approved a few PO’s to get Own Web Now off the desktop. We will now be a cloud-in-the-cloud organization, with all business critical applications deployed on Windows 2008 Terminal Server infrastructure split between two geographically redundant data centers, disaster recovery storage network in Europe and a new level of security and data access audit control.

The infrastructure, inventory, management and licensing all got too expensive to manage and stay on top of. That combined with the massive growth we expect in second year of 2008 made the investment a lot more palatable because it gives us the ability to have rock solid backups, control of all licensing and have a hot backup site in case of s…

Now we can have disposable systems, use Linux / Windows Home / Macs and still have enterprise communication and application access for those that need it. Windows Desktop, it was nice while it lasted, but sorry we’ve got better places to put our money. Ironically, this decision was not rooted in the finances alone, we felt like Microsoft’s distractions with the Web 2.0, online services, search, and really anything but the desktop OS put a huge question mark over whether this is the platform for us going forward – and considering that we spend 3x as much on software licensing than on the hardware purchase (Vostro 1500 is our standard company issued computer).