Trends evolve as companies adapt to new challenges. One trend that continues to gain momentum is the adoption of Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). Sparked by the remote work movement in 2020, many companies still grapple with challenges like data security, data locality, and access to specialized resources—issues less prominent when users were office-based.

DaaS effectively addresses these challenges, and the shift to remote work accelerated their impact across industries. Consequently, the number of DaaS solutions has increased significantly, adding complexity as customers try to choose the best fit.

Solving Industry Challenges

According to Gartner Hype Cycles, DaaS is in the “slope of enlightenment” phase for Hybrid Work, while Hybrid Work itself is in the same phase for the Future of Work. Organizations now understand DaaS as a driver of innovation—especially where high-performance computing and GPU access are critical, regardless of worker location.

Insights from early adopters have expanded DaaS adoption across five key industries:

  • Architecture – Unlocking the full potential of Building Information Modeling (BIM) while integrating seamlessly with essential architectural software.
  • Finance – Enabling secure data access and real-time financial analytics.
  • Manufacturing – Managing large datasets and running complex simulations from any device.
  • Construction – Supporting real-time collaboration, facilitating plan reviews, updates, and team alignment.
  • Engineering – Ensuring smooth, real-time rendering and simulation of complex models.

Historically, performance requirements for these workloads made DaaS adoption challenging, forcing many companies to rely on expensive, high-end devices for their employees. Not all DaaS platforms deliver the performance needed for these scenarios. This is where Softdrive, combined with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), offers significant business value.

The Softdrive Platform

Softdrive’s DaaS solution is built for high-performance and graphics-intensive workloads. Its platform is designed from the ground up to support GPU-accelerated software while delivering cloud economics benefits. More than just another remote desktop DaaS solution, Softdrive offers three integrated components focused on extreme performance and flexibility:

  • Softvirt – A custom virtualization solution tailored for GPU- and CPU-accelerated applications. It directly manages hardware resources to deliver both efficiency and performance, especially for dynamic workloads and scaling teams—enabling high utilization across dedicated cloud servers.
  • Softstream – Softdrive’s proprietary delivery protocol is a key differentiator, built to prevent end-user performance degradation—a common issue with other DaaS offerings. Softstream enables lossless support and color accuracy, allowing precise image reproduction. This is critical for CAD, medical imaging, geospatial analysis, and media production use cases.
  • Softnet – A global management layer that allows customers to:
    • Provision virtual desktops worldwide.
    • Create pooled environments for short-term needs.
    • Integrate with Active Directory (AD) and Single Sign-On (SSO) tools to align with organizational IT security policies.
    • Monitor and analyze activity data.

Together, these components position Softdrive to deliver substantial business value for customers transitioning from on-premises VDI to cloud-based DaaS.

Softdrive on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

While Softdrive is designed for the most demanding workloads, it requires a cloud platform that matches its hardware and performance needs—this is where Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) excels.

OCI offers the best price-performance ratio in the industry, a global footprint unmatched by hyperscalers, consistent GPU pricing worldwide, robust security services, and enterprise-grade support. This makes OCI the ideal infrastructure foundation for Softdrive’s DaaS solution.

With most companies pursuing cloud initiatives and storing shared data in the cloud, OCI’s multicloud capabilities enable Softdrive to run DaaS on OCI bare metal while seamlessly connecting to customer data stored in other clouds. OCI’s multicloud value includes:

  • Meeting data residency requirements with ease.
  • Optimizing costs.
  • Providing low-latency private connections through OCI interconnects.

DaaS Reimagined

Softdrive is dedicated to helping customers meet the critical performance demands of their workloads. With Softdrive, administrators no longer need to be VDI experts. As part of every implementation, Softdrive provides white-glove service to configure, deploy, and maintain the DaaS environment.

Their expertise augments customer cloud capabilities, supporting deployments on OCI or across multicloud architectures.

Partnering with Oracle, Softdrive delivers enterprise-grade infrastructure, including bare metal servers accelerated by the latest NVIDIA GPUs—essential for highly performant virtual workloads. Oracle’s multicloud partnerships further enable flexibility in where application data is hosted.

Softdrive reimagines DaaS—offering a solution that combines cutting-edge technology with cost-effective enterprise performance, offering up to 5X improvements in end-to-end latency.

Additional Resources