NComputing Brings Virtualized ‘Classroom In a Box’ for VARs

VARs in the virtualization space and educational environment have another tool in their arsenal, if they team up with NComputing. The company is trying to make it as simple as possible to deploy a virtualized desktop, be it for a tiny one-room lab or an entire school district. I spoke to Jim McHugh senior VP of global marketing at NComputing, and Daniel Raskin, head of product marketing, about their new VAR-centric program. Here’s what they had to say:

What’s Classroom In a Box? It’s pretty much everything a reseller needs to deploy a desktop environment in a classroom, sans teacher. NComputing is including its pretested and validated virtualization infrastructure complete with all the hardware, peripherals and software users need to be up and running easily. Naturally, it’s also cheaper than deploying the equal amount of PCs, and NComputing supports both Windows and Linux OSes. NComputing has its own client device with a System on a Chip design, making multimedia streaming smooth, and all the components require minimum maintenance — like most virtualization deployments.

McHugh noted that NComputing accounts for 15 percent of the market share of K12-shipping desktop devices in the United States. VARs can expect much in the way of streamlined technologies and easy deployments if they decide to work with NComputing, McHugh noted:

“We’re doing a lot of configuration and pretesting. We give the VARs [configuration] options right down to the storage offerings. Our focus is to give the customers the best success in the deployment and [in turn] give our partners the best opportunity to make margin and revenue.”

McHugh and Raskin emphasized that everything through NComputing is easy. The idea is to provide a solution to an exact problem, rather than providing overkill or the wrong tool for the job altogether. According to McHugh and Raskin, that’s why the company has seen so much success — it’s nearly turnkey. What’s more, the entire platform is designed to scale and scale quickly without issue. McHugh said a VAR could scale a classroom into the entire school building, and then into the entire district, if the customer was so inclined.

NComputing in 2010 launched a new partner program, complete with a partner portal and full of all the things a VAR could need including training, post- and pre-sales details, deployment information and co-branding materials. In addition, NComputing can work with partners on proofs of concept to get to deployment quickly, McHugh noted.

For the future, NComputing has its sights beyond the educational market, and it’s looking to push these easily deployable solutions into the SMB, enterprise, healthcare and even digital signage environments. But NComputing is true to its VARs no matter where they expand into.

“We’re completely partner centric. We don’t do direct sales, but we do direct demand generation to help the partners deploy and fill demand,” McHugh said.

Will Classroom In A Box be your next deployment?

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