It was during Reliance Industries’ 45th annual general meeting (AGM) last year that the Jio Cloud PC was announced. Ever since the announcement, there has been a lot of anticipation around the launch. During a conversation at Yourstory’s maiden Mumbai TechSparks, the company’s flagship event, Shelton Rego VP-Cloud, Jio Platforms said that the Jio Cloud PC is “very very close to launch”. The event was held at the end of March, which means the offering could drop anytime now. Jio Cloud PC will cater to both the B2C (business to consumer) and the B2C (business to consumer) space.
“We are in pre-launch for Jio cloud PC, it is a very ambitious project inside the company so simply put, you have a VDI layer (a virtual display infrastructure) built in-house and then we have a hardware layer built in collaboration with all of the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) – HP, Dell, Lenovo. And the unique thing is we are embedding our own connectivity (Jio True 5G),” Rego said.
Reliance’s focus has always been to democratise technology and access. The data revolution is, of course, common knowledge, so it would be interesting to see how Jio Cloud PC revolutionises the market.
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Rego further explained, “The unique thing is we are embedding our own connectivity. We are embedding Jio into the device so you’ll see these three layers along with things like ‘manage services’. Let’s say you want to be able to troubleshoot remotely, we already have connectivity built into the system, you want to do an installation of an application, we’ll provide you a set of pre-baked applications that you can run and what’s very very unique about this is that this has not been done before by a connectivity player.”
With this offering, Jio hopes to bring “the best” it has from a talent standpoint, from a connectivity standpoint, and also the large partnerships it has built over the years with the likes of manufacturers such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo. “It’s actually a pretty hyped device in the market right now,” Rego said.
Speaking of the use cases, he said it could majorly be in education, healthcare and B2C. “So we have a B2C and B2B (business to business) initiative that we’ll run.”
Jio’s 5G network which will power the Cloud PC is live in 3,972 cities/ towns across states/Union Territories, according to Reliance Jio’s website.
