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.