Windows application appliance vendor Sphere 3D has announced a partnership with Microsoft to take its Glassware 2.0 platform to the cloud through Azure.
“We are committed to providing our customers with new and innovative ways to implement their cloud strategy,” said Vibhor Kapoor, Director, Microsoft Azure Product Marketing. “By working closely with Sphere 3D, we are able to continue to deliver on that commitment and provide a new level of flexibility for organizations looking for scalable application delivery from the cloud.”
In partnering with Sphere 3D, Kapoor is fulfilling his promise to provide customers with new and innovative ways of doing business. The Glassware platform takes a new approach to Windows application hosting, adopting a “less is more” philosophy in containerizing Windows apps to deliver substantially more application sessions per box than a conventional RDSH-based system.
The initial outreach is targeted at the education sector, where Sphere 3D has seen some strong validation of its platform. I first came across Sphere 3D in conjunction with an announcement that Chesterfield County Public Schools (CCPS) was buying 32,000 Dell Chromebooks, one for each middle and high school student in the district. CCPS is one of the 100 largest school systems in the US. Although it had already standardized on Google Apps, CCPS still needed access to Windows applications to support the curriculum. It turned to Sphere 3D and Glassware 2.0 as a low-cost, high-performance appliance-based hosting platform for its Windows apps. While Sphere 3D’s approach to application hosting means it can deliver more apps per server and more apps per dollar than conventional RDSH-based platforms can, the downside is that in education, the hardware sits unused for a quarter of the year. Moving Glassware to the cloud will give Sphere 3D’s education customers another opportunity to save.
Pricing for Glassware on Azure has not been announced yet. There’s ample room to undercut Azure RemoteApp pricing. Microsoft’s pricing structure for RemoteApp is a hybrid of flat-rate and capped consumption-based pricing, with prices starting at $10 per month for a basic session, rising to a capped upper limit of $17. Before Azure pricing was announced, I polled a number of independent software vendors (ISVs) to get their perspectives on possible pricing and received estimates ranging from $5 to $15 per concurrent session per month. Given the performance advantages that Glassware 2.0 has over conventional RDSH-based Windows app hosting platforms, I would expect that Sphere 3D would be able to undercut Azure RemoteApp prices substantially. While it may not be able to hit $5/user/month, I don’t think pricing will be an obstacle to adoption.
A big opportunity for Sphere 3D would be to adopt a pure consumption-based licensing policy. Azure RemoteApp offers good value when used full time, but if it is used for just a couple of hours each week, the $10 starting price starts to look onerous. One user using the Basic Azure RemoteApp service for 100 hours in a month would be charged $17, but 100 users using the service for only one hour each would be charged $1,000. If Sphere 3D could offer an Amazon-like consumption model for its cloud service, it could open up a vast market for occasional-use Windows apps. Pricing could possibly go as low as $0.10/hour depending on resource requirements. This approach would likely be of great interest to Sphere 3D’s education user base. Education’s combination of tight headcount-based budgets and predictable seasonal workload is ideally suited to consumption-based licensing. Glassware may also open the door to low-cost GPU-enabled 3D graphics apps in Azure—something that would be of immediate interest to its education customers.
Initially, Glassware 2.0 will be available only through a select number of authorized partners. So I don’t expect to see such low pricing offered to consumers, but Sphere 3D promises additional use cases and expanded availability later on in 2015, opening the door to a direct-to-consumer model.
Some interesting ideas but not particularly well thought through.
How would Sphere provide usage based licensing when each user must be licenced for the software? That’s a huge upfront cost with little or no assurance the licence fee could be recovered. Microsoft licensing does not allow companies to rent or lease their software.
Does Microsoft Azure provide hourly pricing today? If not, Sphere woukd need to buy in bulk and have some mechanism at the Azure level to calibrate and measure hourly usage. No small or insignificant task.
Re GPU capabilities, Any company wishing to offer that service would need access to the Azure hardware stack to install Nvidia or some other GPU circuit boards. The chances of Microsoft letting s third party have access to their data centre is nil.
Last but not least, Microsoft offers Azure and app services like Office to education for free today. Hard to compete with free
thanks Bill
re hourly licensing
Sphere 3D can obviously license their product however they like, but the underlying platform is Microsoft’s and that needs to be taken into consideration. As it is, Azure already supports hourly billing of Windows Server workloads starting at $0.018/hr and as a cloud service, load-balancing and auto-scaling to meet fluctuations in demand are in effect built-in. So I think I’m good on the part of the analysis.
Re GPU capabilities
My bad, I took a shortcut in my explanation. AWS already has GPU support while Azure which does not. Nevertheless I think you must acknowledge that to compete with AWS, GPU support will come to Azure, most probably later this year. When that happens I’m reasonably confident that Glassware will be able to exploit it. Alternatively if demand for 3D accelerated apps arrives ahead of Azure’s ability to deliver then there’s always the possibility that Glassware will appear on AWS.
Re Hard to compete with free
Very hard to compete with free, but it happens every day. More to the point, Office 365 is available free of charge for students and educators, but this offer does not extend to other Windows apps or services like Azure RemoteApp. In the case of the school board I cited, Chesterfield County Public Schools had already standardized on Chromebooks and Google Apps but still needed access to Windows applications to support the curriculum. Running its apps on a Glassware appliance locally or on Glassware in Azure, the only real difference is how the service is priced.
the fact that Azure offers server workloads by the hour does not necessarily mean Glassware has the embedded tech to support utility billing. That is a non trivial task to build and manage.
More importantly is the issue of licensing. The advantage that Azure has is that is is a one stop shop for utility based pricing for both the server footprint and app licences.
The value prop of Azure goes beyond simplicity and cost vs in house, it is the utility pricing, Azure offers that for everything while Sphere cannot, Azure also offers education discounts that Sphere cannot match. Proposed cost reduction due to claimed performance efficiency would be lost and then some because of licence costs.
Re: “How would Sphere provide usage based licensing when each user must be licenced for the software? That’s a huge upfront cost with little or no assurance the licence fee could be recovered.”
Bill, you don’t seem to be aware that Sphere 3D also entered a Multi-Year OEM Embedded Agreement With Microsoft.
See: http://sphere3d.com/sphere-3d-enters-multi-year-oem-embedded-agreement-with-microsoft/
“Under the embedded licensing program with Microsoft, we are able to deliver turnkey solutions for Windows Embedded Server workloads to organizations ranging from small businesses to large enterprises.”
Thank you for the note re the Windows OEM Embedded Agreement. Perhaps a review of Microsoft’s Licensing policies would be worthwhile to understand the feasibility of the proposed route to market.
The contract you mentioned is specific to Windows Server Embedded, and allows Sphere to bundle only that specific software product on their hardware. It does not permit distribution of the full Microsoft software catalogue including Windows desktop software and applications. Different animals entirely.
To sell an app to an education user, Sphere would have to buy the licence upfront, and rent it on a month to month (or some other such utility model) to match what Microsoft does direct. There are two issues with this idea: almost all software vendors, including Microsoft, do not permit their software to be rented/leased; and it would require a huge amount of upfront capital to purchase the thousands of licences required to service the education market.
Though offering pay as you play, hour by hour services for Windows apps sounds compelling, it does not work within the confines of Microsoft’s license model. Microsoft does not sell or license its software “by the click” with the exception of its own direct programs. As many companies found when investigating Virtual Desktop, the restrictions of Microsoft’s license desktop and application models and contracts can derail the most attractive of business concepts. It can be incredibly complex and convoluted.
Microsoft does not extend their education discounts to commercial enterprises, and that is the most serious gap in the above article. Perhaps a review of the Microsoft Azure for Education site would be beneficial to understand the different levels of service offerings.
Hope this helps. Many a good idea has run aground on the rocks called the Microsoft license and contract model.
Sorry Bill, your understanding of Azure educational discounting is wrong. MS offers Azure free to higher education for use as part of the curriculum, but not in K-12 and the program does not include Azure RemoteApp.
While I’m not in a position to say what Sphere 3D might choose to do wrt licensing their products, I’m pretty sure that you’re not either, but as far as the work needed to implement hourly charge back is concerned, it is far easier than you seem to believe. There are several very good cloud-based services whose primary purpose is to make SaaS billing trivial, hooking into one of those is no more than a few days work.
Pete
That OEM Embedded Agreement With Microsoft doesn’t really mean anything in terms of Azure, it applies only to the Glassware appliances. And even there, it’s no more than what is needed to do business.
Not important.
Regards
Simon
Thank you Simon. I did not intend to suggest that Microsoft offers all their products to education for free other than Office 365. However, they do offer significant discounts to K-12 and higher ed for the complete suite of Microsoft technologies including Azure.
Regardless, the license restrictions for Windows apps still applies to Sphere, and that hurdle would prevent pay as you go licensing and use of the software as you suggested in your original post. I understand that you are familiar with Citrix desktop services. Thus, I doubt I need to remind you of how difficult and combative Microsoft can be when it comes to license issues
I believe that we also need to consider simple human nature in this scenario. A Microsoft education rep gets paid to sell Microsoft solutions, and wants to earn commissions and retire his quota. By-passing the desktop services revenue to a third party, in this case Sphere, is highly unlikely as it would not be in their personal best interest.
Plus, Sphere seems to promote Google and Chromebooks. Anyone that believes Microsoft field rep’s will embrace Sphere in their accounts is under estimating their competitive paranoia and account control demands.
Try as I might, I can’t find anything that confirms that Microsoft offers educational discounts for Azure. If you can point me in the right direction I’ll be happy to take that into consideration and might revise my position. However I’m not convinced that sales quotas would significantly impact Sphere 3D sales the way you suggest.
Any school board that takes the same path that Chesterfield has (i.e., standardizing on Chromebooks and Google Docs) is already effectively lost to Microsoft. I’d argue that offering this type of customer an easy way to consume Windows apps through Glassware on Azure is better for Microsoft than seeing that customer run Glassware as a physical appliance. Microsoft does discount its Windows OS licenses very heavily in education and could well see more revenue through Azure on Glassware than it would by selling Windows Embedded licenses via Sphere 3D and RDS CALs direct to the customer.
Granted Microsoft’s licensing policies are Byzantine at times and the company frequently can’t get out of its own way having to deal with too many internal vested interests to do what is right (VDI licensing an obvious case in point), so there’s plenty of room for them to find ways to not to take this path. Worst-case scenario, probably no more than Sphere 3D implementing Glassware in Azure in the same way that Citrix implements XenApp in Azure with RDS Subscriber Access Licenses.
Simon, I just read some articles regarding Glassware that contained some very interesting information. This includes the news that Chesterfield County Public Schools is NOT using Glassware as reported earlier, and that New Caney School District in Texas only has two users running. That is two users out of 13,000 students.
I would suggest that this presents the usefulness and validation of the glassware technology in anew, and unflattering light.
I have no first hand information about a deployment in New Caney School District so I can’t comment on it directly. but I do find it hard to give any credence to a suggestion, regardless of source, that anyone would contemplate a 2 user Glassware implementation except as a stepping stone between zero and some probably much larger number.
Regardless of your technical experience or agenda you must agree that a 2 user Glassware implementation makes no sense. What then is more likely, that against all logic New Caney has chosen to deploy a web-scale application hosting solution for just 2 users, or that someone is (deliberately ?) misconstruing the state of affairs?