Amazon starts selling desktop software… in the cloud

Amazon today announced the launch of a new Marketplace for desktop apps as a service. Amazon is selling subscriptions to software including Visual Studio and Office, paid on a monthly basis.

The software is run on the virtual desktop infrastructure service that Amazon launched last year, AWS WorkSpaces. These start at $ 25/month for a virtual Windows 7 desktop (provided by Windows Server 2008 R2). Adding, for example, Office 2013 Professional Plus from the AWS Marketplace is another $ 15/month.

To go with the Marketplace, Amazon has released a new tool called WorkSpaces Application Manager (WAM). With WAM, administrators can subscribe to apps for their users, mark certain apps as “required” so they’ll be deployed automatically, make other optional apps available for users to provision themselves, and manage updating and auditing. WAM can be used with both applications from the Marketplace and in-house apps.