Menlo Park, Calif.-based desktop virtualization provider Pano Logic Inc. announced Monday it’s expanding north of the boarder and opening an office in Toronto.
The decision to establish a Canadian headquarters, which will also service the East coast U.S. market, was motivated by the Greater Toronto Area’s large technology talent pool as well as the Canadian background shared by many of Pano Logic’s founding members. Former XenSource co-founder and current Pano Logic CEO Nick Gault was born in Montréal, while CTO Aly Orady was raised in Hamiliton, Ont. and attended McMaster University.
“I’m very happy to be re-establishing my roots with Canada and Toronto, particularly because I grew up and went to school here,” Orady said. “It’s really the perfect mix of talent and customer base and I couldn’t imagine opening up an office anywhere else.”
And with demand for technology professionals at an all-time high in California, Pano Logic hopes recruiting from the Toronto area talent pool can give them a leg up on others in the virtualization space.
“The Silicon Valley has got a high concentration of technology professionals and the talent is just being sucked up by top players like Cisco and Google,” Rob Lalonde, vice-president of East coast sales at Pano Logic and head of the new Toronto office, said. “In Toronto though, we have a very large talent pool without the same type of competition.”
In addition to recruitment advantages, Lalonde said the office’s close proximity to major East coast U.S. markets like Boston and New York was another deciding factor in the move.
“We’re fairly unique in that we’re a U.S.-based technology company putting our Northeastern presence in Toronto, where typically you would see office in the major East coast markets servicing those areas,” Lalonde said.
As for tapping into Toronto and the other major Canadian markets, Pano Logic hopes its flagship desktop virtualization product, the Pano device, will attract Canadian businesses looking to go beyond server virtualization and reduce their carbon footprint in the process.
The Pano is a small silver cube device that uses an USB and Ethernet port to connect to a virtual machine through VMware’s ESX server. The cube has no CPU, memory, operating system or drivers, which Pano Logic described as “a zero client with all the software residing in the server environment.” Users connect the device to a keyboard, mouse, and a monitor and are able to use Microsoft Windows Vista or XP from the remote server.
“You just plug it into the network and it works,” Orady said. “You never have to configure it, you never have to do a firmware update to it, and you never have to worry about it being infected by a virus because there’s no software on the device to be infected.”
By moving all the software off the desktop and onto the virtualized servers, Pano Logic said the cube will reduces desktop total cost of ownership (TCO) by 70 per cent a year. And Lalonde said the savings also lead to environment benefits due to a reduction in power consumption.
“There’s a very green story here, because the device only draws five watts of power, which is only a couple percentage points of what a traditional PC uses,” Lalonde said.
Thus far, Lalonde said Canadian interest has been high on the product as Pano Logic already has five partners on board and numerous plot projects running in a variety of companies.
“Having been out there selling this product, we’re not really seeing similar offerings,” Lalonde said. “There’s no one that can deliver full Windows applications without any software or CPU on the desktop. And because of this zero client offering, we’re seeing a lot of excitement around our solution in Canada.”
While the Pano is currently limited to the VMware-based hypervisor, the company said it developed the device as a “hypervisor agnostic” solution and will be able to work with Xen or Microsoft Viridian hypervisors down the road.
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