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business elite canada
H
FEBRUARY 2014
and wasting insurmountable
time, and began the busi-
ness with this in mind after
running a web-development
company. “The idea of User-
ful actually came from my
experience at the company
where we would continually
have to buy and set up new
PC’s. I thought ‘why can’t we
just plug extra users into the
same computer,’ and that was
the genesis of the concept of
User ful,” explains Griffin.
His entrepreneurial spirit led
the company to grow from
a handful of installs to over
1 million virtual desktops in
over 100 countries.
The traditional PC refresh
cycle has become obsolete
and the company promotes
the usage of more modern
computing solutions such as
desktop virtualization. “The
basic problem is that, today,
organizations are taking an
outdated approach to dealing
with computers. They have
a large number of comput-
ers that they refresh every 3-5
years which is a huge cost and
maintenance burden.”
The User ful approach is to
replace physical desktop com-
puters with low-cost client
devices plus desktop virtu-
alization software and con-
nect the solution to a central
server-appliance which han-
dles all the computing, more
commonly known as desktop
virtualization (VDI). User ful
Multiplatform turns a stan-
dard computer into a server
appliance and a single server-
appliance can manage twenty
or more virtual desktops with
a choice of MicrosoftTM Win-
dows, cloud, Linux and re-
mote desktops. Desktop virtu-
alization is often construed as
complicated and expensive,
though with User ful’s design,
VDI can be deployed in min-
utes at a high-per formance
