The Future of Computing started with ME

In 2015 Myself and one of my staff attended a Microsoft hosted summit in Dubai. The keynote speaker was talking about Azure and virtualisation when he said, “In the future we will even be virtualising our desktop computers” I of course made the remarkable statement, “we did that 18 months ago”. Shortly after a series of meetings started that over the years after its launch saw the forming of a partnership between me, my team and the technical teams from Microsoft.

In 2013 I presented the board of a multinational engineering company with a new concept of computing. Since the first version of the new concept went live in 2015, I with a handpicked team became the first in the world to virtualise everything from a multinational organisation into the cloud. From IaaS to SaaS, we virtualised all the production servers from every office around the world the cloud. It took months to fully synchronise the terabytes of data from nearly a hundred legacy servers from offices all around the world and although we hit many stumbling blocks along the way, this exercise was highly successful. Eventually, after several months we virtualised all servers, all our data, all backups and then finally, all desktop computers too. The first fully virtualised company in the world from input, through compute and storage to output.

The technology didn’t exist in 2013 but we finally managed to get a few of the big players to take us seriously even though it took them more than a year to see the benefits for themselves so I started with employing some technical guys as mad as me maybe who were excited by my vision and were up for the challenge of doing what others eventually put on their roadmap for the future and were trying to work out how it could be achieved. I reviewed all the applications and solutions on the market and realised there was nothing that matched what we needed so I took the best of them and forced them together to produce a hybrid solution which combined the best cloud services with the best virtualisation services to make a load balanced secure terminal service. The first version saw Citrix with it’s incredible authentication and load balancing virtualised in Azure, most scalable, powerful and management friendly cloud service provider.

In late 2017, myself in a joint presentation with Microsoft and members of my team announced the new version which was launched the first quarter 2018. A significantly upgraded service that was named “Dau” that goes the last step in realising the virtualised dream setup. The performance enhancement was staggering.“Dau” which is a Welsh word that simply means 2 is symbolic of not only my Welsh heritage but the heritage of the company it was designed which was at that time a 40 year old Welsh company. Dau represented the 2nd piece in my vision of the future of computing.

What was different about Dau? “Imagine being able to use applications like AutoCAD or complete complicated, sophisticated 3D drawings or videos on any device with internet access including a mobile phone as fast if not faster and more secure than a high-end workstation even while on a train or at an airport or in a meeting anywhere in the world hosted on the cloud.” That became reality in stages between 2013 and 2018. The idea I came up with seamed like science fiction, the technology didn’t exist. However, there were cloud services, there was a business case and there was the persistence we possess in the valleys of South Wales.