Virtual Desktop Visionary Stoneware, integrates Google Apps

Some folks talk about Service Oriented Architectures, some talk about Virtual Desktop Infrastructures, and some folks do something about it.

Stoneware, Inc. has been gaining momentum on its flagship product, webOS (due to ship April 2008) and as a result has been getting some pretty healthy media attention.

Well, their latest release (5.3) is going to directly incorporate Google Apps in its Virtual Web Desktop, which is slated to incorporate “Windows, web and hosted applications in a single, ubiquitous web desktop interface.”

The tight integration of Google applications will definitely make Stoneware an interesting player in the space, and perhaps make them even more attractive as an acquisition property for one of the competing giants.

These are exciting times – when the humble world of HTML and JavaScript have been leveraged to the hilt, and AJAX applications now rival traditional executables in functionality and behavioral metaphors. Stoneware seems poised to deliver what many of us have dreamed about for as long as bandwidth has been increasing.

Check these guys out. I especially like the screenshot (above) that shows Excel running remotely through a web page. So much potential here.

And – for those of you about to rally back with “Citrix already does this!” – think again. Yes, they both do presentation virtualization, but consider what having it all web-based does for you, and how most of your organizations computers probably already have all the software they’d ever need to run it.

It’s not a revolutionary prediction, but expect a web-based desktop in your organization soon.