Tell us about how Liquidware Labs started and your executive team?

BIENEMAN: Liquidware Labs was born in 2009, when Tyler Roher and I got together after our respective companies had been acquired.   I founded Vizioncore, the pioneer of virtualized backup and recovery, which had been acquired by Quest Software.  Tyler was a key player and instrumental to the success of Foedus, which had been acquired by VMware.

We went on to acquire two other small virtualization companies, vmSight and Entrigue Systems, which had developed some really exciting technologies, although they probably were ahead of their time when we acquired them.   The vmSight acquisition provided us with the basis of the Stratusphere software we offer today and the Entrigue technology was two products, which were the foundation of ProfileUnity.

My current executive team includes members from vmSight, Entrique, Dunes (another pioneer in virtualization acquired by VMware), and a number of key individuals from Vizioncore who I just brought on in the 3^rd quarter of this year.  We have every intention of replicating the great model we created at Vizioncore by building quality products, and a quality extended channel of partners who are making the commitment to become proficient in desktop transformation and our software suite.

Where did the company get its name?

Well Tyler had the name Liquidware in his sights – we wanted our name to convey that we were vital, easy to absorb and fluid.  We added Labs to the name to convey the idea of being lab developed and scientific in our approach.  Our offerings would be partner-tested software, methods and processes to enable desktop and application virtualization.

So being the Liquidware Lab guys allows us to be fluid and innovate to develop IP, and then release it as part of our methodology, enabling partners to field test our offerings in real-world settings.  This approach was and will continue to be our go-to-market.  We want to enable participation in emerging technologies, such as leveraging cloud-computing resources to host Windows applications and virtual desktops.

What is the career accomplishment that you are most proud of?

BIENEMAN: Well obviously, to have created a market for something that was unknown at the time, i.e. back up and recovery of VMware ESX Server images and coining the term “Virtualize for DR!,” is kind of one for the history books.  Now that market is so ubiquitous, I don’t think anyone remembers the early days when we were the lone voice preaching to the partners about why it made sense to learn about VMware and Vizioncore… the 1-2 punch of VM image based backup for DR.

But I’m  equally proud of the products and the environment we’re creating here at Liquidware Labs, because we’re helping to invent this market as well.   We’ve changed the way the major hardware and virtualization vendors provide assessment.  We lowered the cost and the risk to migrate users to new systems.  We’ve created a validation methodology based on a composite metric that rates Windows® applications and end user experience into an overall Good/Fair/Pool scorecard.   We’ve become the on-ramp to VDI leading the desktop transformation space and a major player bringing a simple, affordable user virtualization solution to market.  All of our solutions are available on a low overhead virtual appliance and are proof positive to the meaning I described earlier of the name Liquidware Labs.  We are probably the only truly virtualization pure-play 3^rd party software provider for virtual desktops.  A lot of our competition started on the physical side, and we don’t think their approaches translate as well on the virtual side of things.

We also were the first out there with a Desktop Transformation theme and a methodology for moving your desktops from physical to virtual. We recognized early on that this would be a complex undertaking because first of all, you are dealing with a big abstract – physical desktops and second, those desktops are very dynamic because they are acted upon by users every single day.  Desktop virtualization is on a very different scale from server virtualization so you need a solid process to take you step- by-step through the lifecycle.  Our process goes through assessment, design, migration and validation and our solutions explicitly support this process.   All this was done by design and we have been working this way and teaching our partners and customers this methodology since 2009.  It’s nice to see the platform vendors and our competition have jumped on board with these concepts – but I think that’s because this is the most direct path to success.

How would you describe the market conditions now, compared to 1 year go?

BIENEMAN: Really interesting.   We have seen a very strong commitment from the virtualization platform vendors and other infrastructure suppliers to focus on and address the challenges that arose out of the early days of desktop virtualization.  A lot of 3^rd-party software companies are also very, very innovative in creating software that is bringing down barriers to adoption, so we really have some momentum here.

A lot of early adopters for desktop virtualization tried to leverage the one-to-one persistent VDI model that worked for server virtualization.   However consolidating applications onto servers is one thing; consolidating user settings, personalization, data and applications onto a single VM is something else.  It’s the user that is the variable in this desktop virtualization scenario, and companies found that they quickly maxed their storage and networks ability to support the intense demands of a persistent 1:1 desktop environment.

Many companies shelved these early projects –but the projects didn’t go away – they just needed a fresh reason to resurrect them.    So today, these projects are being revisited for two main reasons – the first is that the technologies and best practices have become sophisticated enough to make this happen in a reasonable, cost effective way.   For example, leveraging a shared, “stateless” virtual desktop image and applying user virtualization does away with many of the resource constraint issues of the persistent model.

The second reason is that many industries are being pushed by outside forces to fast-track a desktop virtualization project.     An obvious cause, Windows 7, and soon 8, PC refreshes, make this a good time to look at an upgraded platform.

Healthcare is being driven by compliance regulations and a need to have a common platform with doctors’ offices who basically BYOC to the collaboration.

Academic institutions are another group who are implementing virtual desktops because of the sheer number of desktop images they have to support for a very dynamic, constantly changing consumer group.

Other companies are being driven by the fact that they have disparate desktop platforms due to acquisitions and need to find a common platform.   Or they have outside customers, or offshore developers, for example, who need access to their systems.   Still other companies need to provide very high levels of security for the systems and data and want to lock down their desktops.

What links all these organizations is their common commitment to learning about and investing in desktop virtualization technologies.  They are seeking out and working with the right partners who can supply them with the knowledge and software they need to make it work – to scale and still be affordable.  We have had customers come back to us and tell us after they got over the learning curve and initial migrations, they cannot imagine ever going back to a physical model.

Is there something that comes to mind when you think about this past year that you would do differently next year?

BIENEMAN: No.  I think we are doing everything right – we just need to do more of it.   Maybe the one thing is that we have to be more vocal about what we are doing and make sure the market understands us, our methodology and our offerings.  We have been heads down on our technology, but it’s really time to share the good news.  And the really  good news is, we have more IP ready to be delivered which will further cement our direct relevance to the successful implementation and operation of virtualized user desktops, applications and cloud computing.

What are your 2012 goals?  Where do you want to be one year from now?

BIENEMAN: We are on a trajectory to double our size by the end of next year — for revenues, employees and number of channel partners.    We also have laid out a roadmap of significant features and refinements in our product set to not only make them easier to use, but also to automate many of the more difficult aspects for moving virtual desktops into production.   Our goal is to ensure that the user experience of a virtual desktop completely rivals that of the physical desktop.

To that end we are introducing a product we call FlexApp, which is in beta testing right now.

ProfileUnity with FlexApp delivers user-installed applications across both virtual and physical desktops. So businesses can capture and deploy user-installed, “follow-me” applications within stateless, non-persistent shared image desktops in VDI and physical PC environments.   This product will be out for beta before the end of 2011.

We are also introducing Stratusphere Designer for beta in Q4 2011 as well.   Designer is the logical next step that organizations need to take after they have assessed their desktop infrastructure, users and applications. Stratusphere Designer delivers image, host, and storage designs for consultants and project leaders who are implementing a virtual desktop strategy. Storage costs and performance limitations have been the number-one roadblock to VDI adoption. Our image design is especially groundbreaking because it leverages real-world assessment data to design the best ‘many-to-one’ shared-image strategy, which reduces the storage footprint and ongoing management costs.

We think both of these products will add a serious dimension of competitive advantage for us in 2012.

Who is your biggest competitor?

BIENEMAN:  For point products we have some competitors.  However if you try to find another vendor who offers a complete desktop transformation suite, there is no other.

On the assessment side with Stratusphere™ FIT, we are really in a class by ourselves with the most sophisticated software and best track record of use by leading systems integrators and professional services organizations worldwide.   We’ve created VDI FIT™, which is a composite metric, which rates user and application workload and is part of our methodology for assessment and design.  We could say the same for the monitoring and validation side, with Stratusphere™ UX.  Our UX composite metric system is leading the way for Windows® application user experience validation.  UX is a really unique solution because it supplies desktop administrators with a view into the actual user experience of how their virtual, physical and terminal server desktops and applications are performing.  We offer per user and application visibility in heterogeneous virtual and physical environments, a class of insight Windows desktop admins definitely don’t available today.

Our biggest competitor for our user virtualization solution, ProfileUnity™ is AppSense®, no doubt.  But we really think ProfileUnity is more tailored for the virtual environment – for one thing it runs as a virtual appliance.  You do not need to make a big investment to obtain it and use it.   We also offer a significant feature set for a very competitive price – about 1/3 of what they cost.   And ProfileUnity is cross-platform – physical, virtual, terminal servers.  It migrates not only selective parts of the persona, but migrates and decouples data from the user profile.  This means securely migrating data without using a script or human to visit each desk. You’re talking about a big user experience gain with the persona migrated and not having to ask users to step out of their seats while we migrate potentially GB’s of their data. So anyone considering migrations from a previous OS to Windows 7 should consider us to make this process much more manageable and cost effective.   And anyone looking to migrate to virtual desktops should definitely be looking at us for a reliable and affordable solution.

Who do your prospects think your competition is?

BIENEMAN: As we said, our competition offers point products.

In user virtualization, they would think our competition is AppSense and RES.   For assessments with Stratusphere FIT, maybe Lakeside Software, but their feature set and depth of reporting is not a match for ours.   There has been some dialog recently that AppDNA, recently acquired by Citrix, and ChangeBase, recently acquired by Quest Software, do assessment kinds of activities, but in reality these solutions are best for evaluating application compatibility when consolidating to terminal server platforms or when introducing one application to an existing base of applications – very, very different from what Stratusphere FIT does.  The overlap might be that AppDNA, ChangeBase and Stratusphere FIT all three have an application virtualization comparability scorecard.  However, only Stratusphere FIT gathers capacity planning metrics of actual user workload consumption, user experience and infrastructure constraints.  These last metrics are the first things you need to determine before you can plan a migration and test your software for compatibility.

For desktop monitoring and validation, a lot of customers may have system monitoring tools that they think can provide them with the right information, or they think that virtualization platform tools will give them a universal desktop view, but this is just not the case.   We are the only vendor to offer an integrated solution – Stratusphere UX — from desktop to the datacenter for desktop administrators to see how their virtual and physical desktops, applications, networks and servers are performing across the entire organization.

Why is your firm the best?

BIENEMAN: We literally have some of the smartest people on the planet working for us when it comes to virtualization technologies.  A lot of us started experimenting with it when we were still teenagers and have decades under our belts even though most of us have not even hit our 40s yet.

Another thing, we really value relationships – with each other, with our partners and with our customers.   We want them to feel good about working with us.  We value integrity and trust in all our relationships.

Does the federal government have a role in IT?

BIENEMAN: Yes, I think they do from the perspective of aggressively making sure that IP is protected, so that at innovative companies, like Liquidware Labs, we can feel that we can develop new technologies without the threat of piracy either nationally or globally.   Also software in particular is a global phenomenon — our customers and partners are worldwide and there may come a time when some of our development is overseas, although that is not the case today.   So we need to have a trustworthy and cooperative climate in which to do business.

Finally, government needs to step up resources for education and technology readiness.  I don’t think that we can ever do too much to ensure future generations are equipped to keep a cutting edge there.

Do you see a hot IT technology sector (besides the one that you are in)?

Yes, although it’s a related sector, it would be leveraging the cloud.   That sector is in the same state that desktop virtualization was with regard to moving toward being a mainstream choice.  It needs an enabling methodology where the right technologies, providers, architectures and compliance pieces are combined together to deliver a go-forward plan for organizations to pilot and scale.  We will be watching how cloud develops with great interest.

Q: With many recent announcements, it appears, over the last few months,that Liquidware Labs has had lot of new developments. What’s the catalyst behind all these changes?

AKERBERG: I think what you’re seeing is the evolution of a company that’s in the right place at the right time with clearly the right solutions. The desktop virtualization market is maturing –and vendors like Liquidware Labs have been innovating to solve many of the challenges of transforming desktops to VDI.

The key to success here — and this is something Liquidware Labs recognized from the start — is to approach desktop virtualization with a methodology. There is definitely a process to follow that will ensure success. We created a proprietary desktop transformation methodology back in 2009 that revolved around the critical steps of Assess, Design, Migrate, and Validate. Our solutions are built to explicitly support that process.

Today you’ll see our competition mimic our Desktop Transformation theme – we’ve seen them use similar language: “Assess, Analyze, Deploy” or “Analyze, Plan, Deliver, Optimize” – and we have even seen them cobble together partnerships to try and tell the same story. But … the fact remains that we are the only company today that not only has an established methodology that is proven, but is also directly supported by a suite of products from a single vendor.

So in our assessment and design phases, our products —Stratusphere FIT and, soon, Stratusphere Designer — will guide you through those steps. The Migration phase is supported by ProfileUnity and the Validation phase is supported through Stratusphere UX. Customers are not left wondering how to execute on the methodology — Liquidware Labs products lead them through it. Nobody else has that. If you go with other solutions, you’ll need to spend time integrating them and getting educated and supported from separate vendors. This will cost time and money.

So all of the recent developments have really come out of industry and market recognition that we are a “go to” company here. We are deepening our alliance partnerships with VMware, Cisco, EMC, NetApp, Dell, and Citrix, among others. As customer demand is going up, we are bringing in the sales and support talent globally to meet that demand. We are also broadening our channel and promoting our partners’ expertise to take customers through our process. We’re also expanding development efforts to ensure that our feature sets are unrivaled in the industry and respond directly to real-world needs of customers.

Q: You have strong partnerships with VMware, Citrix, EMC, Cisco, and Dell, can you tell me about these relationships?

AKERBERG: The industry is used to seeing ‘marketing’ partnerships…our relationships go much further with these vendors to a “strategic” level. All of these platform leaders have negotiated access to be able to enable their field SEs and technical gurus to use certain solutions from us to help transform desktops. All include the ability to assess desktops and many of these relationships include the ability to use our ProfileUnity User Virtualization solution to migrate users from legacy XP or Windows 7 desktops to new infrastructures running Windows 7. We are continuing to focus on developing complementary solutions to the platform vendors to extend their offerings and accelerate adoption of VDI.

Q: You guys have long been known for virtual desktop Assessments, but lately we’ve seen you making more noise about User Virtualization and your ProfileUnity solution. Why now?

AKERBERG: User Virtualization is really picking up momentum in the market and we are positioned well to answer the needs to the customers here. Whether you are simply looking to migrate to Windows 7 from XP or embark on a full desktop transformation to VDI – user virtualization is key to success. User virtualization solves a very fundamental issue of decoupling the user profile, data and settings from the O/S making it portable both in a new virtual environment as well as if you stay physical.

Customers can realize huge savings and benefits using ProfileUnity for automated migration of physical desktops from XP to Windows 7…and soon Windows 8. Normally this process involves many man-hours of tedious manual effort to touch each desktop and this manual effort can result in more error. Also you risk potential security breaches with people exposed to private data. Finally there is the loss of productivity as each worker is interrupted during migration. ProfileUnity can automate this process and do it the scenes to eliminate risk, loss of productivity, and shorten the overall time of the project.

Sometimes, companies need to support heterogeneous desktops for a single user. A good example would be an environment that has both Windows 7 and XP desktops for the same user. A robust user virtualization solution can make the user experience seamless for logon to either OS. This also readies the user for what we have trademarked as an ‘Anytime Migration’ to their next desktop.

Because user profiles are stored on a network share, they can easily be backed up, which sets the stage for a DR strategy for your desktops as well. We have some exciting new webinars coming up on these topics if your readers want to know more about how this would work in their environment.

Finally, user virtualization allows customers to deploy a shared stateless non-persistent virtual machine image strategy, when they virtualize desktops with solutions from vendors like VMware and Citrix. A robust user virtualization tool is critical because you’re basically blowing out any user personalization at logoff by automatically destroying the virtual machine the user was using. ProfileUnity retains the personalization. This leads to significant cost savings in VDI through dramatically lower storage costs, licensing costs, and overall less management.

Q: How does ProfileUnity compare to the other offerings in this space?

AKERBERG: We see one key competitor with regard to User Virtualization, and that is AppSense. AppSense has been in the market for a while and have their own strengths but we compare very favorably to AppSense where it matters and address critical buying factors that they do not.

Customers will make choices on what is important for them in a solution and typically we win when ease of use and installation, lower cost and scalability in the enterprise are at the top of the list.

You can get our solution up and running very quickly because our straightforward architecture doesn’t need a complex arrangement of databases and IIS servers and obviously, the cost and time to set all of that up. By relying only on existing Windows architecture and not additional servers, we have no single point of failure in our architecture.

Second, a heavy agent does not need to be installed for our solution, we use a centrally located network hosted agent that is very lightweight in nature to dynamically make the users’ persona, settings, and user authored data readily available from any desktop Windows experience that they log onto.

We also have some compelling features that are not found in AppSense, like automated user authored data migration and caching for application virtualization packages. These features are key in providing automated migration, data availability, and access to application virtualization packages like VMware ThinApp, even when the user is offline.

Finally, when you look at the TOTALITY of what Liquidware Labs does with our desktop transformation suite, AppSense again, does not offer end-to-end desktop transformation solutions. They have formed a partnership with Lakeside to try and emulate our approach, but customers still have to deal with the issues of point solutions from different vendors, finger pointing, time, and added cost. We are the most complete, low cost, user-friendly total-solution option on the market, hands-down.

Q: What’sall the buzz about user installed applications?

AKERBERG: ProfileUnity will soon offer a new and innovative feature knows as FlexApp. FlexApp will offer the ability for users to install their own applications, even in non-persistent VDI environments. This technology will open up VDI to an entirely larger user base for organizations to be able to include knowledge workers and power users in the VDI pool. We plan to ship FlexApp by the end of this year. Also, shortly after releasing our User Installed Applications (UIA) technology this year, we will be coming out with a Departmental Installed version (DIA) as well so Admins can install apps for groups of users outside the base image to ultimately continue to lower storage costs with less master images.

Q: So what’s on the horizon for 2012?

AKERBERG: With Liquidware Lab’s complete and only desktop transformation solution set and our award winning User Virtualization solution, we are looking for a successful continuation of the momentum we have enjoyed this year. We know we have the right partner channel and alliances who share our vision to ultimately help more customers realize the benefits of VDI. We plan to continue to remove the barriers to adoption, whether that means developing new technologies, simplifying deployment or lowering the cost. Our mission was and will continue be to make desktop virtualization a reality for the masses.

AppSense, an industry leader in providing user virtualization products, recently announced that they have experienced another banner year in terms of finances.

As of June 30th, 2011, the company expanded its finalized orders by more than 50 percent worldwide since 2010, pushing revenues to an excess of $68 million. Furthermore, the company remained committed to improving its workforce, expanding employee leadership roles by 62 percent. Enterprise conveyance of the company’s user virtualization products was the primary focus of the increased assets. Experts forecast a $2.3 billion industry segment in coming years, and AppSense’s products create a streamlined user experience in every delivery mode. By removing the user portion of the desktop from the operating system and all its independent administration software, the AppSense User Virtualization product allows businesses to change their desktop environment and buy into the new “use your own device” movement. Furthermore, the software makes it possible to manage data remotely from any computer.

Additional achievements in 2011 include:

• AppSense now claims more than half of the American industry segment
• The organization secured $71 million in funding from Goldman Sachs in February
• In May, Harry Labana joined the company as chief technology officer
• Expanded EMEA presence with agencies in France and Nordics
• Created a cloud and mobile software Research Facility in Santa Clara, CA

In addition, AppSense has extended its business relations with integral business partners. Microsoft Corporation awarded AppSense the role of Managed Independent Software Vendor in May. Furthermore, AppSense’s User Virtualization Platform exceeded Cisco’s rigorous interoperability standards on the company’s Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI). AppSense also revealed that their User Virtualization Platform is now a basic component of Hewlett-Packard’s latest Client Virtualization Reference Architecture. Such promotions clearly show that AppSense products are widely deemed to be essential technology as companies seek to change their desktop environment to system that more directly caters to the user.

As one of Microsoft’s top business associates, AppSense supplies virtualization products for consumers which enhance Microsoft’s USV product lineup by offering expanded features which assist in transformation of XP profiles to Windows 7 profiles by effortlessly consolidating each into one file, promoting faster Windows 7 function in your business. Furthermore, the software also provides reliable application performance in both virtual and physical instances by extracting the owner’s desktop customization and software selections. One can enhance the features of App-V and USV by executing them simultaneously, allowing users to access both their programs and data from more than one computer, therefore eliminating the need to have constant access to a single device.

Virtual Computer’s NxTop 4 recently won a Virtual Intelligence Briefing Emerging Technology Special Recognition Award.

Here is our snapshot view on Virtual Computer.

Virtual Computer, a leader in the smart desktop virtualization market, announced recently the fact that their NxTop® VDI solution is rapidly growing.

Virtual Computer is pairing client-hosted Virtual Desktop Infrastructure along with centralized management. The flagship product of the company is the NxTop®, which makes controlling a large number of desktop computers plus laptops as effortless as running just one. It also provides brand new areas of versatility and productiveness to clients.

The company highlights that NxTop offers ultra-fast local PC performance, total mobility, as well as superior management compared to other VDI solutions, and for a fraction of the price according to Virtual Computer.

NxTop Enterprise is a unique system that will support virtually any mixture of desk-top delivery products from client-hosted VDI to maintained access points pertaining to cloud apps plus server-hosted VDI. Managing is significantly made easier via centralized, one to many graphic deployment and upkeep. The system additionally features a selection of safety features starting with AES-256 full hard drive encryption all the way to remote destroy abilities.

Motivated by marketplace needs throughout numerous market sectors, such as health, finance, law and government, improved partner registration, as well as larger geographic business expansion, Virtual Computer multiplied their new customer base and over-all earnings in the 2nd quarter of 2011.

The company’s accomplishment occurs within a great shift in buyer demand for client-hosted rather than server-hosted virtualization options. Market frontrunners such as Lenovo and Intel show increased support for this particular trend, and Intel is promoting the phrase, smart desktop virtualization. Lenovo declared early this season that they will deliver direct imaging in the case of the Virtual Computer NxTop product.

The company is additionally witnessing swift progress within its Resellers as well as Service Provider programs, leading to the current release of their Global Partner Channel. Looking at their deal enrollment data, these associates are creating a significant pipeline of consumers seeking to buy within the next 3 months.

As IT crews anticipate Microsoft’s most recent OS, they’re confronted with an assortment of issues. Should they re-fit current computers, or set up Windows 7 for a multi-year renewal? Are current apps plus hardware systems totally compatible? Just how much consumer education is going to be needed?

With NxTop, different OS’s may be implemented using a few clicks. NxTop’s virtual desk-tops are independent of hardware differences, and because the NxTop hypervisor is compatible with Windows 7, you won’t ever need to be worried about the availability of Windows 7 drivers for any of your computer models.

Interview with Carl Eberling, VP and GM, Virtualization & Monitoring, Quest Software

Tell us about how the company started and your executive team?

Quest was founded in 1987 in Newport Beach, CA. Vinny Smith, currently Quest’s executive chairman, joined the company in 1995, became CEO in 1998, and took the company public in 1999. In 2008, Doug Garn became CEO and president, and Smith became executive chairman. When Smith first joined Quest in 1995, the company had just 25 employees and $4 million in revenue; today, the Quest has approximately 3,500 employees worldwide and had $767 million in revenue in 2010.

Where did the company get its name?

One of key traits that makes Quest unique is the passion of our employees and our ongoing “quest” for the continuous improvement of management solutions for IT professionals. We are never complacent, because we understand that business and technology landscapes are ever-changing. We’re always driven by that quest, and that’s where the name comes from.

Career accomplishment that you are most proud of?

The proudest moment of my career came when the analyst firm IDC named Quest software as the market’s number one ISV for virtualization management. It showed that Quest is delivering on its commitment to provide customers with solutions that simplify even the toughest challenges for IT professionals. At the end of the day, that’s why we’re in this business.

Most important career influencer?

During my time at Verizon Wireless, I had the pleasure of working under Roger Gurnani, who was CIO at the time. He was a great role model. He was always persistent in making sure that we were involved in every detail of operations. He never allowed us to get disconnected from the primary reason we were in business. That’s a mindset I try to take with me to work every day.

What about your experience and history before Quest?

I’ve been fortunate to work at some truly dynamic companies to address critical IT challenges. I spent 17 years with Verizon Wireless, where I eventually became CIO overseeing IT for the western half of the U.S. I then spent two years as senior vice president of IT for Kasier Permanente. Both of those experiences really prepared me to take on the challenges here at Quest.

What are the major problems that you help your clients address?

Quest Software simplifies and reduces the cost of managing IT for more than 100,000 customers worldwide. Everything we do is ultimately about delivering simplicity at work. Quest provides innovative solutions that make solving the toughest IT management problems easier, enabling customers to save time and money across physical, virtual and cloud environments. We deliver solutions for today’s most pressing IT challenges, including administration and automation, data protection, development and optimization, identity and access management, performance monitoring, and migration and consolidation.

Have you experienced a similar market today and where your company or technology is positioned relative to the competition?

I think we are in the midst of a very interesting time in IT, especially with the emergence of cloud. Companies are really working hard and spending a lot of marketing dollars to tell the story of cloud in a manner such that it fits with the product offerings they have in space. As a result, I think customers are really left wondering what the true definition of cloud is and how it best fits into their current and future business models. How that plays out will really define the future of IT management.

With regard to not just to cloud, but to all aspects of IT management, Quest fits it in where we have always sought to fit in – as a trusted advisor to IT administrators. Quest’s value to administrators goes beyond just providing them with the tools they need and extends to being a trusted partner who provides mission-critical support when they need it most. Simply put, we are the people that companies call to make sure they have what they need to get the job done right.

How would you describe the market conditions now and for the rest of this year?

I think you’re seeing an interesting dichotomy in the IT management marketing right now. You’re seeing the large legacy vendors really leveraging their size and spending power in an attempt to gain more share of the market. At the same time, you’re seeing a lot of small startup companies attempting to deliver a tremendous amount of value and position themselves as alternatives to the legacy vendors. So the startups are working harder for attention than they have ever had to in the past; and the legacy vendors are working harder than they ever have to keep them at bay. It’s an interesting mix, and it’s one of the reasons we’re very happy to be the company that fits nicely in the middle, delivering the best of both worlds to our customers.

Is there something that comes to mind when you think about last year that you would do differently this year?

Quest is focused on building synergy across our products to create an increasingly cohesive set of broad solutions that simplify IT management and enable customers to save time and money across physical, virtual and now cloud environments. We’ll be very focused in 2011 on delivering increased innovation in key areas that are driving and changing the IT management market.

Has there been a point in time with Quest that made you say to yourself “we are on to something here”?

“It’s tough to pick just one category, because we have many to choose from, but I would pick our Desktop Virtualization category. Even back when virtualization was still in its infancy, Quest truly believed that it represented the next frontier in IT management, efficiency and flexibility. We envisioned ourselves leading the way as it evolved. So when we really started see that vision come to fruition with the customer wins and huge successes we’ve had with vWorkspace, it was really gratifying for us. Customers are fundamentally changing what they use a desktop for today. We’re delivering a whole new model for how not just desktops, but the workspace itself, will be delivered in the future. I think we are sitting at the precipice of supporting a whole new way of meeting client needs in the future.”

Your 2011 goals?

In 2011 and beyond, Quest will continue to work to cement its identity in IT organizations around the world as the company you want in the foxhole with you. If you are trying to keep your systems up and running, if you are on the front lines, we want you to understand that Quest has your back. Quest is there to help. Everything we do here is aimed at delivering solutions to customers that make their lives easier. When systems are complex, and others are just ‘talking’ about helping, chances are we have already seen it, and that is when we shine most.

Who is your biggest competitor? Who do your prospects think your competition is?

I really see our competition as two pronged in that we compete with both the large legacy vendors as well as the small niche players. That means we have to be more innovative than the smaller niche players, and at the same time, we have to prove our worth against the big players. It’s a challenge, but we firmly believe that providing a combination of portfolio breadth and product depth is the best way for us to deliver what our customers need.

Why is Quest the best?

At the end of the day, it comes down to the people. There’s a spirit of innovation that exists throughout Quest that’s unlike anything I have ever experienced in my career. It’s a company that knows no borders. We’re constantly challenging ourselves to do what’s in the best interest of our customers. Great things happen when that’s your mindset.

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Greg and I chat about the role of the application in cloud computing.  We talk about server vs. desktop application virtualization, implications on software licensing, and the scalability and agility associated with software that doesn’t have to be installed.

Original content & story : Cloud Chronicle

http://cloudchronicle.com/interview-series-ep5-greg-oconnor-of-appzero/

Part Two of our interview with Len Rosenthal, the Vice-president of Marketing at Virtual Instruments. He is one of the early employees of the company, having joined them in late 2008. His impressive background includes executive marketing roles at Panasas, the leading supplier of high-performance parallel NAS storage systems, PathScale (acquired by QLogic), Inktomi Corporation and SGI.

Tell us about how the company started and your executive team?

Virtual Instruments (VI) was spun out of fiber-optic communications equipment supplier, Finisar in June 2008. Finisar primarily sells to system and storage OEMs like IBM, HP, EMC, Cisco, Brocade, and HDS, but not to enterprise IT end-users. VI was initially formed to exploit existing Finisar SAN monitoring technology, called NetWisdom, and apply it to enterprise environments. The company has evolved substantially over the last 2+years, with an entire new suite of software and hardware products designed completely by the Virtual Instruments engineering team. Thus far we have been able to double sales in each of the past 2 fiscal years and are well on our way to tripling sales this fiscal year. Therefore, we are very pleased with the customer adoption rate of our SAN and Virtual Infrastructure Optimization products.

We are fortunate to have a very strong leadership team here at VI starting at the top with CEO John W. Thompson, the former CEO and current Chairman of the Board at Symantec. Prior to leading Symantec, John spent 28 years at IBM, mostly in senior sales management. Other senior executives include our VP of Engineering, Barry Cooks who came to VI from VMware and Sun Microsystems before that, VP of Sales Sean Maxwell (EMC, QLogic, McData),VP of Services Bo Barker (EMC, PeopleSoft), VP of Marketing Len Rosenthal (Panasas, QLogic, HP), and CTO Skip Bacon (Oracle, Seibel) to mention a few. Overall, we are about 90 employees, almost double the number we had at this time last year. Given the combination of an exciting new market category (Virtual Infrastructure Optimization) that we compete in and the success of the company, we are able to attract top talent across the company, both in the US and Europe.

Where did the company get its name?

At its core, the company makes measurement and instrumentation products to optimize virtualized IT infrastructure in terms of performance, availability and utilization. Hence, the name Virtual Instruments made a lot of sense to the founding team.

 What does your company do? What are the major problems that you help your clients address?

Virtual Instruments is benefiting from 2 major industry trends that are driving our growth. The first is the increasing use of virtualization technologies, both for the server virtualization and storage virtualization. Virtualization and cloud computing abstract the physical IT architecture and inhibit visibility into what is really happening inside of the virtualized data center. To successfully deploy business-critical virtualized applications, which are inherently I/O-intensive, IT managers need real-time visibility into both the physical and virtual infrastructure to enable them to optimize performance, availability, and utilization of those infrastructure assets. The 2nd trend is the massive growth in stored transactional data, which Gartner projects to be growing over 50%annually over the next 4 years. This tremendous growth is leading to very large, complex, multivendor SAN and storage infrastructures that are increasingly having problems that lead to business impacting outages. There is a critical need to proactively find these problems before they affect end-users and that is one of the key advantages of the Virtual Instruments products.

Have you experienced anything like this before in regards to the market today and where your company or technology is positioned relative to the competition?

Virtual Instruments is a unique company in that we solve a very focused problem. I have been in the industry for over 25 years, but have never worked at a company that essentially has no direct competitors. The analogy I often use relates to the medical field. I feel like we are addressing patients with heart problems by providing an MRI when all other “competitors” are using stethoscopes. Both tools are used to determine if you have a heart problem, but the stethoscope just tells you there is a problem, whereas the MRI tells the cause of the problem to help you both fix the problem and prevent future problems. Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom is like an MRI for your virtualized IT infrastructure. I would agree that not everyone needs an MRI, but if you are having irregularheartbeats (aka: vmware related performance problems), having easy access to an MRI is a huge benefit that will save time and money.

How would you describe the market conditions now and for the rest of this year?

Our business is currently experiencing tremendous growth primarily related to our two core value propositions. (1) We help companies directly and immediately reduce both OPEX and CAPEX, and (2) we help IT organizations ensure performance and availability SLAs for virtualized infrastructures. Even during the last two years, where we have essentially been in a deep recession, our business was doubling in each of those years. Looking forward to the rest of 2011, we only see our growth accelerating as our core value propositions still ring true, but now the economy is clearly recovering and companies are back to strategically investing in IT again.

Is there something that comes to mind when you think about last year that you would do differently this year?

Our success has been primarily limited by our ability to get the word out about our company. Candidly, most IT managers don’t know who we are as we are still one of the industry’s best kept secrets. We are still relatively small compared to the larger IT vendors, so it’s always a challenge to spread the word about VI. In hindsight, given our strong results in 2010, we would have invested more on marketing and sales people in 2010.

]]> http://www.vibriefing.com/2011/03/interview-with-virtual-instrument-on-virtualwisdom-the-fortune-2000s-virtual-infrastructure-mri/feed/ 0 http://www.vibriefing.com/2011/02/mokafives-purnima-padmanabhan-tells-us-about-visionary-desktop-virtualization/ http://www.vibriefing.com/2011/02/mokafives-purnima-padmanabhan-tells-us-about-visionary-desktop-virtualization/#comments Tue, 01 Mar 2011 04:34:22 +0000 VIB http://www.vibriefing.com/?p=4463 Tell us about how the company started and your executive team?

MokaFive was started by a group of Stanford researchers who began to whiteboard the possibilities of desktop virtualization and found themselves on a visionary quest that culminated in a completely disruptive innovation. They were contemplating the potential and value of providing freedom to the computer user in the form of hardware independence. Their theory: by providing a secure container independent of hardware, IT, corporations and service providers would be able to provide a secure computing environment on any computer or personal computing device.

Immediately, they questioned the approach: is it better to centralize the execution of virtual machines in a datacenter, or distribute it to the endpoint? After considering the inherent limitations of the networks and the plummeting cost of desktop hardware, the answer became clear – local execution provides the best user experience at the lowest cost.

In 2005, we started MokaFive with an investment from a few angels and proved out the theory with the first MokaFive Player. It proved to be an early hit with customers. The idea that you could deliver a consistent and standard ‘uniform desktop’ to all end-user personal computing devices, while centrally creating and deploying it, had proven to be a popular and efficient approach as we delivered our first commercial product in 2009. Late in 2010 we added a service provider edition to the product line.

Where did the company get its name?

We were looking for a short, catchy name that people would remember. We had four founders plus Vinod Khosla, our angel investor, for a total of five. Vinod saw the potential to change the way people use computers, and that’s why he invested in us.

What about your experience and history before (current company)?

I started my career in hardware chip design at Cirrus Logic, and post my MBA at Stanford I switched to management consulting at McKinsey. While it was a rewarding experience, it left me wanting more ownership. I then transitioned into a product strategy and management role at a startup called Loudcloud. Founded by Marc Andresson and Ben Horowitz, it was cloud before anyone had started thinking about the cloud; truly providing services as a utility. We built a very sophisticated datacenter management system and built up the organization to deliver services on demand. After Loudcloud was sold to EDS, I moved to Marimba, a datacenter and desktop management company, to run marketing. Once we sold Marimba to BMC, I stayed on at BMC to run product management and strategy for the service management business. Mid 2008 after a call with a recruiter and a follow up conversation with Dr. Monica Lam, MokaFive founder, I was a convert. I felt that MokaFive’s approach was not just an incremental improvement or tightening of the knob, but game changing for both users and IT. Ultimately our vision is to deliver a truly liquid computing experience to you on any device, fundamentally improving the way you interact and create.

What does your company do? What are the major problems that you help your clients address?

MokaFive transforms computing with a revolutionary approach that makes the desktop more secure, resilient, and flexible. Business is on the move; more workers, more devices, more locations. MokaFive makes your desktop as mobile as you are so that you can work anywhere, anytime, on any device. By separating the desktop from the device, MokaFive enables it to be centrally managed and secured yet played locally on any device yet be secure. Today, our next generation desktop management solution provides the answer to key business challenges, including:

• Mobile Computing – MokaFive understands the work environment needs to be mobile and not bound by four walls, limited choice or network access. With MokaFive, you can contain the entire corporate desktop in a bubble and drop it on any corporate or personal device, and manage it securely. Through our centrally managed and locally executed approach to virtual desktop management, we make desktops as mobile as the people that use them, so they can work anytime, anywhere and on any device yet be secure. They can even work while offline.
• Windows 7 Migration – Migrating to Windows 7 is a huge challenge facing many enterprises. The manual effort to install an OS on many machines in different locations is costly and can overwhelm a lean IT staff. By encapsulating Windows 7 into a virtual desktop, customers can now remotely deploy Windows 7 without a deskside visit. And, if necessary, users can run legacy XP applications on the host environment, avoiding any Windows 7 compatibility issues.
• Choice Computing – Enterprise workers are no longer content to work on a locked-down, one size-fits-all, corporate-issued desktop. Further, based on the smashing success of Apple products in general, today’s workforce is increasingly demanding device choice, including Macs, iPads and other tablets. MokaFive enables Macs in the enterprise without the need to staff Mac experts, opening the door to device freedom to executives and junior staff alike. Using MokaFive IT can deploy the standard corporate Windows environment to a Mac or even a PC. Virtual desktops can even be deployed on a USB stick or smartphone SD-card, so users always have access.
• Outsourcing – The rapid rise in remote, telecommuting, part time and transient workers has rendered corporate borders obsolete and made networks extremely porous. Provisioning and de-provisioning outsourced assets and contract-based staff can be a huge challenge from a cost, security, provisioning and maintenance standpoint. MokaFive provides an innovative way to easily provision new contractors with a corporate virtual desktop directly onto the personal machine, and remove their access with the click of a button when they’re done. Additionally, letting contractors use their own machines greatly reduces hardware and maintenance costs, while still enabling them to receive the secure, controlled access to the network they need.
• Secure Remote Access – MokaFive provides the tightest remote access security available. By completely encapsulating the corporate environment into a secure virtual desktop, MokaFive isolates corporate resources from infections on the personal device. MokaFive encrypts all data and continuously scans for malware while the virtual desktop is in use, providing the advantage of mobility with no liability. Now you can safely access your corporate information from anywhere.

How would you describe the market conditions now and for the rest of this year?

As far as the market is concerned, there is a lot of excitement about desktop virtualization. There is a belief that virtualization can fundamentally transform the way IT provides computing services to its users, directly improving their productivity. This promise has pushed desktop virtualization along with cloud services, as one of the top priorities for most enterprises. While last year, the focus was on server-based desktop virtualization (also known as VDI), this year is the year of client or locally executed virtual desktops. The beauty of the client approach is that the virtual desktop can execute on an endpoint and be available online or offline – making it low hosted desktops by a factor of ten to one. Furthermore, the mobility, security and recovery capabilities that MokaFive provides are simply unmatched in the industry. We streamline management to cut costs, and numerous customers say we create higher business value at nearly half the cost of other solutions.

]]> http://www.vibriefing.com/2011/02/mokafives-purnima-padmanabhan-tells-us-about-visionary-desktop-virtualization/feed/ 0 http://www.vibriefing.com/2011/02/qa-with-reflex-systems-president-ceo-preston-futrell/ http://www.vibriefing.com/2011/02/qa-with-reflex-systems-president-ceo-preston-futrell/#comments Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:19:45 +0000 VIB http://www.vibriefing.com/?p=4444 Who uses Reflex solutions within an organization? Is the entry point usually through the VM side of the house or networking?

Reflex primarily targets the virtualization administrators or those that directly manage the virtualization infrastructure, although the “who” can vary from company to company. Due to the unifying nature of virtualization, networking, security and server teams are being brought together in ways that were not necessary in the past with physical infrastructure. As organizations expand their use of virtualization, the models for how IT structures and uses virtualization solutions will have to adapt, as will the role of the IT professional managing them. To address such evolution, Reflex’s integrated virtualization systems management approach provides multiple “views” into the virtual environment that are tailored to the needs of various IT teams. For example, while VMC provides a holistic view the overall infrastructure for virtualization administrators, it also offers network-specific data and security-focused data in the context of virtualization for networking and security teams.

Why does someone need VMC along with Cisco Nexus 1000V and how has the adoption been of VMC with the Nexus 1000V?

Quite a few Reflex customers use both Cisco Nexus 1000V as well as Reflex Virtualization Management Center (VMC) as they are complementary technologies that shed light on the virtual infrastructure in different ways. The Cisco Nexus 1000V is a virtual switch used by many of our current customers for QOS, manual access controls, and other network management functions that are similar in functionality to their physical switches. Reflex VMC is used in conjunction with the Nexus 1000V to provide an additional layer of comprehensive virtualization management offering more detailed monitoring, audit trails of all configuration changes, automated policy for access controls and correlation with other events within the virtualization infrastructure. The VMC provides a broader management framework that interacts with all virtual objects to track changes, provide security, and centrally manage various virtual devices, including the Nexus 1000V, in context of the overall virtual infrastructure.

Are customers looking at Reflex even if security is not a concern? Do you have customers that purchase VMC for either vWatch or vProfile?

Absolutely, Reflex VMC provides end-to-end virtualization management for server and virtual desktop infrastructure by integrating three critical management components of virtual data center: vWatch Monitoring and Audit, vTrust Security and Segmentation, and vProfile Configuration Management. Reflex believes that security is an important feature to the overall administration of the virtual infrastructure and should be integrated into broader set of management capabilities. The majority of our customers utilize at least two, if not all three, of the management modules we offer today. Many of our customers are drawn to Reflex solutions because of the breadth and integration of the management functionality verses a single point solution approach. It can be very difficult and time consuming for virtualization administrators to manage anywhere from 3 – 6 various point solutions that do not integrate and correlate to help determine how events affect the entire infrastructure. The Reflex approach offers flexibility in a consolidated management solution that can be tailored to meet the needs of a particular enterprise.

It seems that security is an area that has been lagging behind as far as adoption in virtual environments? Do you think this is so and is it any different than what the dynamics are in a non-virtual environment?

There are several reasons we believe stand-alone virtual security adoption is lagging and broader virtualization management solutions with integrated security functionality are gaining more traction in the market.

1.  Historically, security has been more of an afterthought when building out a new infrastructure, whether in a physical data center or the virtual data center. This is still true today but we see that organizations are looking at, and defining, security in the virtual enterprise in a different way. In the virtualization context, the security focus is less threat-based than it is typically defined in the physical infrastructure (firewall, IPS, etc.) and more centered on compliance, audit, segmentation, and policy enforcement. Security has become part of a larger virtualization management challenge rather than a stand-alone traditional “security” issue. Enterprises certainly need to address the same elements of security in the virtual environment as they do in the physical environment but the way to approach it and go about implementing it is very different. Just virtualizing existing physical security devices does not accomplish the security needs in the virtual infrastructure. Organizations must look for broader solutions that integrate security and management and are purpose-built, virtualization-aware and tailored to the nuances of the dynamic virtualized environment – where changes happen much more frequently and on a much larger scale.
2. Another challenge for virtualization security adoption is the intrinsic way most enterprise IT departments are comprised – in silos. As mentioned above, networking teams, server teams, storage teams, security teams, etc. each have specific roles and responsibilities in managing the physical data center that don’t necessarily intersect or involve the other teams. Each department has a budget to support its specific function and doesn’t span into other areas of IT. For example, the security team may not necessarily have administrative access to or decision-making ability over “virtualization tools” – even those that provide security functionality – for the virtual infrastructure. And the virtualization team may not have budgeted for security related products. This minor detail can surely cause somewhat of a stall in purchasing decisions and deployment. Though virtualization is becoming a unifying technology across the enterprise, bringing these teams together, many organizations have not yet adapted their processes to support this type of cross-functional management and until they do, there may continue to be a slower adoption for virtual security point solutions.

Can you give us an example of how Reflex has helped customers manage and secure their VM environments?

Medquist is a leading provider of medical transcription software and services, and technology-enabled clinical documentation workflow, based in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. The company wanted to leverage its virtualization investment while facilitating resource sharing and providing the security and segmentation needed to meet compliance and auditing criteria. They came to Reflex to provide granular visibility, segmentation and to meet government-mandated compliance and auditing criteria. By utilizing Reflex VMC and all three modules – vWatch, vTrust and vProfile – Medquist has been able to save IT management time and preserve the benefits of the virtualization investment. Medquist’s Director of Virtualization said, “No other solution has the holistic, broad-based approach, deep integration and level of granularity that Reflex provides. To say it is a time saver is a massive understatement.”

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