In the cloud era, on-premise VDI is as good as dead. Sure, "on-prem" VDI will stick around for a little longer — like all legacy technologies do — but it's in the life-support phase. Why? Because there is a very good reason why the cloud exists and the only thing keeping VDI alive is the simple fact that there aren't many other options for running virtual desktops without doing it on-premise.
Yet VDI is incredibly powerful. [98% of the Fortune 500 run virtual desktops](its massive adoption in Fortune 100 (http://virtualization.info/en/news/2009/08/more-than-10-of-fortune-500-uses.html) because they're vastly superior to traditional computers in many ways: They're more secure, easier to manage and can be scaled up and down on demand. The deal-breaker for most businesses is setting VDI up and keeping it running.
Imagine for a minute that all of the inherent complexity of VDI was abstracted away into a simple interface where you could add virtual machines on-demand with the click of a button?
That's what Paperspace set out to solve: The power of VDI without the complexity. We take care of the servers, networking equipment, virtualization, disaster recovery, load-balancing, redundancy, licensing, firewalls etc. and put it all behind an elegant web-based interface. For the first time, a business of any size can have access to the technology normally reserved for the big guys. In fact, it's so easy to use that 50% of our customers setup and manage Paperspace without any involvement from IT personnel.
Companies have been moving away from the on-premise model for the last 10 years. Today, with the public cloud as mature as it is, you'd be crazy to be racking your own servers. Even the largest companies are moving everything to the cloud. If you're thinking about going virtual, unless data centers are your core competency, you shouldn't be going down this road.
This is what exists today:
The Citrix/VMware on-premise model
Enormous infrastructure spend, server maintenance, complex networking, VPNs...
##### This is what the future looks like: ## Welcome to Paperspace  *Click button, get machine*
