Harry Ruda, the guy who sold Softricity, the application virtualization start-up, to Microsoft two years ago, is now flogging the virtualized desktop-as-a-service, DaaS so-called, a logical extension to Softricity when you stop and think about it.

His new venture, Desktone, is ambitious. It means to have carriers like Verizon, whose traditional communications services are increasingly in jeopardy, and tier one computer companies like IBM use their infrastructure to deliver the outsourced service as service providers to large desktop populations.

Desktone will have a revenue-sharing arrangement with the service providers.

Naturally it’s supposed to eliminate the complexity of VDI and eradicate the barriers to adoption. The enterprise doesn’t have to build or deploy anything; it just has to sign up. And the service provider gets to turn a profit on its data center.

When exactly any of this will go live depends on ironing out some existing bugs. Maybe by the end of the year. And we’ll have to see what the latency is like.

Desktone calls its scalable hosted subscription-based platform Virtual-D and expects the service to run $60-$80 a month per desktop, a savings of anywhere from $300-$800 a year, Ruda calculates, depending on a company’s TCO, and cheaper than if you did it yourself.

It’s got Merrill Lynch using it sans service provider and Merrill says Desktone’s open architecture will let it swap the best-in-class virtualization technologies as they become available.

It could be Xen, XenSource, VMware ESX or Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

Desktone has also tied up with Wyse for low-power thin clients, promising users meaningful cuts in CAPEX and OPEX. Rich or repurposed clients can also be used.

The way Virtual-D works, the enterprise is supposed to be able to manage the virtual desktop environment – via a web-based interface – supported by the physical resources owned and maintained by a third party that reside either locally or with the service provider.

The enterprise can do virtual resource management, virtual desktop administration and template lifecycle management. It’s also supposed to be able to continue to use whatever operating systems, best practices, help desk and security policies it used before.

• Cloud Computing: CDI - Desktops in the Cloud