Nivio

Nivio is a privately held Cloud Computing company which has a vision to connect the World to computing, applications and digital content. It gave world its first Windows based online desktop and is the winner of the Technology Pioneer Award at World Economic Forum, Davos 2009. Nivio's offices are located in Switzerland, United Kingdom, Australia and India.

History

Nivio was founded in 2004 by Sachin Dev Duggal and Saurabh Pradeep Dhoot, both having studied together at Imperial College London.

In 2007, AMD granted an undisclosed sum to assist in development efforts.

Achievements

Nivio gave the World its first Windows based online desktop and allows users to use cloud computing services(soon to offer Windows 7), the ability to rent full versions of all the Microsoft applications monthly and 10GB of free storage for life. The company also claims that it will, shortly, be launching other major software vendors products within the service and also that it can migrate 98% of applications written for Windows to ITS Platform and thereby allow such vendors to offer their products on a SaaS basis without re-development.

The company was selected as one of the 2009 Technology Pioneers by the World Economic Forum.

Nivio also announced the launch of the nivioCompanion in 2009, an early part of its “Computing without a computer” strategy, with Bharti Airtel Limited of India. This is a low cost offering including keyboard, mouse and a set-top-box style terminal. For this, plus a monthly service charge the user gets high-speed broadband access, full Windows XP functionality, Office 2007 and 10GB of storage. The concept behind this is to massively increase Internet access without users having to incur the expense of a full-function PC nor the complexity required to manage one. The Indian media took up the story quite aggressively but, to date, no information has been released on take up.

Nivio also claims to be acting in the corporate world providing hot-desking and secure remote data access for legal firms and banks using the nivioGrid but managed by integration partners serving those customers and markets. Nivio has started operations in Australia having selected NEC to host its infrastructure for a newly launched hosted Windows service.

The company claims not to be a hardware company, stating that its intention is simply to provide people access to their computer from whatever device they want. There are rumors that the company intends to launch a phone and/or wifi device which will also access the service but Nivio has refused to confirm.

Sachin participated in the World Economic Forum 2010 at Davos vouching his support for Cloud Computing and said "If you trust banks, trust the cloud...your data is safe!". Nivio says that is set to launch new products in the year which it claims are set to change the way users compute using the cloud. .

Awards and Recognition

In 2009, Nivio was awarded the Technology Pioneer Award by World Economic Forum for its technical innovations in affordable computing access. Later in the year, the President and CEO, Mr Sachin Dev Duggal was appointed Youth Leader of the National Computer and Electronics Committee by ASSOCHAM.