Akorri Ranked 43rd in The Wall Street Journal’s Top 50 Venture-Backed Companies List

Littleton, MA, March 15, 2010 – Akorri, Inc., the leader in virtual infrastructure performance and capacity management for the dynamic data center, announced today that it has been ranked 43rd in The Wall Street Journal’s list of the Top 50 Venture-Backed Companies with the most potential to become “the next big thing,” published in the March 9, 2010 edition. In addition, Akorri was among the companies featured in an accompanying WSJ article titled Tech Start-ups Cope with Data Flood.

According to The Wall Street Journal’s Top 50 Venture-Backed Companies article, the publication leveraged research firm VentureSource, a unit of The Wall Street Journal owner News Corp., to select 50 out of 10,000 privately held, venture-backed companies in the US with the greatest potential. VentureSource’s strict set of standards for eligibility included only companies that are valued at less than $1 billion (to identify lesser-known companies) that had raised an equity round of financing in the past three years. VentureSource then analyzed the remaining 5,194 candidates with the following four criteria: 1) the track record of success for the venture-capital investors who sit on the company’s board; 2) the amount of capital raised by the company over the last three years in comparison to its peers; 3) the track record of success for the company’s founders and chief executive; and 4) the recent growth in the value of the company. In addition, Dow Jones venture capital reporters and editors reviewed and ranked the companies. The overall rank is based on a weighted combination of all five components.

“We are delighted to be recognized by such a prestigious media outlet as The Wall Street Journal,” said Rich Corley, Founder and CTO for Akorri. “I founded Akorri with the idea to change how IT managers optimize virtualized infrastructure performance. We’re well on our way to delivering on that vision and The Wall Street Journal’s recognition is another example reinforcing Akorri’s market acceptance.”

About Akorri BalancePoint
BalancePoint allows IT organizations to optimize virtual and physical server and storage infrastructure to reduce costs and assure service levels as companies advance through the stages of virtualization adoption and into private cloud computing. BalancePoint provides an infrastructure-wide analytical systems management solution that offers visibility and control to troubleshoot and assure performance, plan server and storage capacity, and manage service levels. BalancePoint is available as a virtual appliance, supports VMware vSphere, plugs into VMware vCenter and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V and all other major hypervisor technologies. It interoperates with all the major storage vendors including EMC, HP, NetApp, IBM, Dell EqualLogic, Hitachi Data Systems, and 3PAR.

About Akorri
Akorri develops cross-domain analytical software solutions that optimize performance and utilization in the dynamic data center. BalancePoint virtual infrastructure management software provides automated, infrastructure-wide visibility and analysis to help enterprises fix problems, optimize utilization and improve performance for both virtual and physical servers and storage. IT organizations use BalancePoint to reduce IT infrastructure total cost of ownership and ultimately enable a service oriented infrastructure. For more information, visit www.akorri.com.

The future of computing is that your cell phone will become your primary computer, communicator, camera, and entertainment device, all in one. The exciting new applications are running in the browser, with application code and data in the cloud, and the cell phone as a major platform.  I think in the near future there will be docking stations everywhere with a screen and a keyboard. You simply pull out your phone, plug it into the docking station, and instantly all your applications and data are available to you. You can connect to the Internet via your cell phone service, WiFi hotspot, or wired connection.  Your phone will have enough storage so you can decide which applications and data are stored on your phone, and which will be in the cloud. Replication will work seamlessly in the background so that you always have a backup copy of your data in the cloud. Where does that leave the PC industry leaders? Scrambling towards mobile.

Why do leaders fail to adapt? The Innovators Dilemma, made famous by Clayton Christensen, clearly explains why market leaders fail to make the leap. Innovation usually happens at the low end of the market where the products are simple, prices are low, margins thin, and the market totally undefined. The industry leaders have great margins, high prices, and customers who want more features and are willing to pay for them. The industry leaders always move up market and leave the new emerging market to smaller innovators. The process usually follows these 6 steps;

1. The disruptive technology is discovered, often by the market leading company.
2. Marketing people seek reactions from customers and industry analysts.
3. Established companies decide it is a better strategy to speed up the pace of sustaining technical advancement in their own product rather than go down market with the disruptive technology.
4. Start-ups learn about the disruptive technology and see opportunity. They keep their cost structure low, build the technology, and find new markets through trial and error.
5. The start-ups get some initial success and then move up market and eat away customers from the market leading company.
6. The market leading company finally jumps on the bandwagon reluctantly with a half hearted attempt and fails. It is too late.

Giants don’t die quickly – IBM dominated the mainframe computer business in the 60’s and 70s. They didn’t make the shift to Mini-computers until it was too late. They did finally make the transition from a hardware company to a professional services company and IBM is still a very successful, but different company.  

Digital Equipment, Data General, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, and others attacked IBM from the low end with Mini-computers and Workstations. They didn’t try to build a better mainframe. They moved the market to lower end, cheaper, faster, computing models. I worked at Digital Equipment in the late 80’s when they had over 130,000 employees and billions in revenue. However, when the platform shift to PCs happened none of these industry leaders made the leap fast enough. None of these companies exist today. (Update) Actually, Hewlett Packard does exist today as HP, and is better known for printers…and PCs.

The platform shift to PCs was ironically started by IBM. However, they quickly lost the lead to Compaq, Dell, and others. The real winner in the PC platform shift was Microsoft. Microsoft dominated the PC software business in the 80s and 90s, and extended that dominance into server software like Windows Server, SQL Server, and Sharepoint. Will Microsoft lose its dominance to a competitor that builds a better desktop Operating System? Some would argue that Apple did with the Mac, but Microsoft still has over 90% market share. Another proof point that market leaders don’t lose their dominance to competitors…they lose it to market shifts. Like IBM, Microsoft will be a financially strong company for many years to come. But, an innovator and industry leader?

Platform shifts have 10X the number of devices and users. The move to Mobile is big and fast. Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley says Mobile Internet usage is bigger than most people think, and it is exploding. Every platform shift has 10X the number of devices and users. There were about 1M mainframes, 10M mini-computers, 100M PCs, and 1 Billion cell phones. The next wave of mobile devices will be over 10B.

Think about the mobile phone you had in 1999, just a little over 10 years ago. Mine was a Motorola StarTac flip phone. It was state of the art at the time, but it had no camera, no email, no text messaging, no web browsing…just a phone. Now think about where mobile devices will be in 10 years. The iPhone you have today will feel like the StarTac of 10 years ago.

There will be an explosion in mobile bandwidth too. Again, think about the Internet access you had 10 years ago…probably 56K dial up or 128K ISDN. Today broadband is nearly universal. With the roll out of the 700Mhz wireless spectrum over the next 5 years we will see an explosion in mobile bandwidth just like we did from dial up to broadband. This will enable amazing new mobile applications and businesses.

Google’s big bets on the future of computing line up perfectly with the vision of “exciting new applications are running in the browser (Chrome), with application code and data in the cloud (Gmail, Google Apps, Google App Engine), and the cell phone as a major platform (Android). Oh, and that web search thing looks like it will be big too. :-0

Will history repeat itself? Will the previous platform leaders (PCs) fail to make the leap to lead the new Mobile platform shift? Will it happen in three years? All good questions that are open to debate. The direction seems clear, it is just a matter of time.

Check out Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing

Innovative Architecture Integrates Compute, Networking and Virtualization in a Single Platform; New Services and Partnerships Focused on Next Generation Data Centers
Photos.

SAN JOSE Calif. – March 16, 2009 - Cisco today unveiled an evolutionary new data center architecture, innovative services and an open ecosystem of best in class partners to help customers develop next-generation data centers that unleash the full power of virtualization. With today’s announcement, Cisco is delivering on the promise of virtualization through Unified Computing – an architecture that bridges the silos in the data center into one unified architecture using industry standard technologies. Key to Cisco’s approach is the Cisco Unified Computing System which unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources in a single energy efficient system that can reduce IT infrastructure costs and complexity, help extend capital assets and improve business agility well into the future.

Today’s announcements extend Cisco’s data center portfolio and are a critical step in the company’s Data Center 3.0 strategy. To help customers accelerate the transition to the Unified Computing architecture, Cisco is paving the way with a comprehensive suite of new Unified Computing services. In addition, Cisco today announced collaboration with industry leaders on the Unified Computing System and architecture.

The Cisco Unified Computing System: Based on industry standards, the Unified Computing System is a new computing model that uses integrated management and combines a “wire once” unified fabric with an industry standard computing platform to optimize virtualization, reduce data center total overall cost, and provide dynamic resource provisioning for increased business agility.

• Reduces total cost of ownership: up to 20 percent reduction in capital expenditures (CAPEX) and up to 30% reduction in operational expenditures (OPEX).
• Improves IT productivity and improves business agility: provision applications in minutes instead of days. Shifts the focus from IT maintenance to IT innovation
• Increases scalability without added complexity: managed as a single system, whether it has one or 320 servers with thousands of virtual machines.
• Improves Energy Efficiency: significantly reduces power and cooling costs.
• Provides interoperability and investment protection through industry standards-based infrastructure

Innovative Design for Next Generation Data Centers

Taking a clean slate architectural approach to data center infrastructure, Cisco today introduced the Unified Computing System which unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a scalable, modular architecture that is managed as a single system. The Unified Computing System is the first offering in a new family of products which complements the Cisco data center portfolio. Key Unified Computing System elements include:

Compute - Cisco designed an entirely new class of computing system which incorporates the new Cisco UCS B-Series blades based on the future Intel® Nehalem processor families (the next generation Intel® Xeon® processor). The Cisco blades offer patented extended memory technology to support applications with large data sets and allow significantly more Virtual Machines per server.

Network - The Cisco Unified Computing System provides support for a unified fabric over a low-latency, lossless, 10 Gigabit-per-second Ethernet foundation. This network foundation consolidates what today are three separate networks: local area networks (LANs), storage area networks (SANs) and high performance computing networks. This lowers costs by reducing the number of network adapters, switches, and cables and by decreasing power and cooling requirements.

Virtualization - The Cisco Unified Computing System unleashes the full potential of virtualization, by enhancing the scalability, performance and operational control of virtual environments. Cisco security, policy enforcement, and diagnostics features are now extended into dynamic virtualized environments to better support changing business and IT requirements.

Storage Access - The Cisco Unified Computing System provides consolidated access to both storage area networks (SANs) and to network attached storage (NAS). Support for a unified fabric means that the Unified Computing System can access storage over Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet or iSCSI, providing customers with choices and investment protection. In addition, IT staff can pre-assign storage access policies for system connectivity to storage resources, simplifying storage connectivity and management, and helping to increase IT productivity.

Management - Management is uniquely integrated into all the components of the system, enabling the entire solution to be managed as a single entity through the Cisco UCS Manager. The Cisco UCS Manager provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), a command line interface (CLI), and a robust application programming interface (API) to manage all system configuration and operations. Cisco UCS Manager helps to increase IT staff productivity, enabling IT managers of storage, networking, compute and applications to collaborate on defining service profiles for applications. Service profiles help to automate provisioning and increase business agility, allowing data center managers to provision applications in minutes instead of days.

Energy Efficiency - IT managers can achieve more energy efficient data centers with the Cisco Unified Computing System – it uses one-half the components, and requires less cabling and power/cooling than legacy server installations.

Cisco Unified Computing Services

• Building on more than a decade of experience in the data center, Cisco today launched a suite of new Unified Computing Services to help customers capture the full technical and business benefits of the Cisco Unified Computing architecture.
• Strengthening the data center portfolio already offered by Cisco and our partners, the new services range from architecture design, planning, and migration, to operations, and remote management. These services touch all aspects of data center resources people, processes, and technologies.
• Cisco’s unique collaborative services model combines Cisco Services’ deep intellectual property with best-in-class services partnerships to deliver integrated solutions to our customers.

Open Partner Ecosystem - Cisco is collaborating with an open ecosystem of industry leaders to help stimulate technology innovation, augment service delivery, and accelerate market adoption of Unified Computing. More details on these partners available here.

The Cisco Unified Computing System and associated services will be generally available to customers starting in the second quarter of 2009

Full Agenda Posted for Global Open Source Events

Raleigh, NC – March 15, 2010 - Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that registration is now open for the 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. The Red Hat Summit and JBoss World are considered to be among the premier open source events for attendees to learn about the latest in open source cloud computing, platform, virtualization, middleware and management technologies. Both events are co-located in Boston at the Seaport World Trade Center and will take place June 22-25, 2010.

Red Hat Summit and JBoss World attendees will benefit from technical and business classes, hands-on labs and demos, customer case studies, keynotes from industry leaders, networking opportunities and direct collaboration with Red Hat engineers.

The agenda is now posted for Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. Tracks for Red Hat Summit include: What’s New, What’s Next, Open Source for IT Leaders, Decoding the Code and In the Weeds. JBoss World tracks include: Enterprise Insights; Optimize, Secure and Manage; and Developer Insights. There will also be one joint Red Hat Summit and JBoss World track on Cloud, covering how open source cloud technologies can deliver expanded flexibility, scalability and costs savings for IT infrastructures.

“Red Hat Summit and JBoss World are designed to strengthen and grow Red Hat’s global user community and to highlight the benefits of using open source software,” said Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat. “The events offer attendees exceptional opportunities to network with industry peers and meet with Red Hat executives to address individual business and IT requirements and learn about the latest solutions from Red Hat and JBoss.”

New to this year’s event schedule, key members from the JBoss.org Community will host JUDCon, JBoss Users and Developer Conference, on June 21, 2010. JUDCon is an event by developers, for developers with presentations highlighting a broad palette of deep technical dives into JBoss.org Community projects and related technical topics of developer interest. For additional details, visit www.jboss.org.

Those registering for the conference by May 1, 2010 will receive an early bird discount of 20 percent off the full registration fee. There are a number of additional registration specials including 25 percent off for alumni attendees and government and academic registrants, as well as group-rate discounts. Registration includes admission to conference sessions at both events, all conference meals and all Red Hat Summit and JBoss World networking events.

To register for Red Hat Summit and JBoss World please visit www.theredhatsummit.com. Follow Red Hat Summit 2010 on twitter at www.twitter.com/RedHatSummit.

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider and a component of the S&P 500, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for six consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with virtualization, applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses, including:

• Intuit Online Payroll: A small business application that offers business owners a new way to efficiently run payroll, pay taxes and let employees check paystubs all within one integrated online office environment.
• Manymoon: The company’s free work and project management application for Google Apps makes it simple for businesses and teams to organize and share information including tasks, projects, documents, status updates and links with co-workers, customers and partners.
• Professional Services Connect (PS Connect): This new cloud-based offering coming soon from Appirio, pulls contextually relevant information on people, projects, customers and transactions from a user’s domain and surfaces it directly inside a Gmail message so services professionals can make more informed, real-time decisions.
• JIRA Studio: A hosted software development suite from Atlassian enables software developers to flow naturally between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other design and development tools in order to better track and manage project issues and workflow.

Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each. The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike. That’s the power of the cloud.

More than just a store – There are lots of “solutions marketplace” style web sites that list lots of different applications. But, they are basically just links to another web site where you can purchase the software, download, install, provision, and handle integration on your own. Why not make it easy? Why not have one place to purchase applications that are already integrated, use Single Sign On (SSO), and launch-able from within your email app? That is the idea behind Google Apps Marketplace.

Developers, Developers, Developers – Building a vibrant ecosystem on a business platform is all about developers. Giving developers an easy way to sell their products to millions of customers is a big plus. Making it easy to integrate, providing rich APIs, and developer support are essential. This is my new job at Google. The Google Apps Developers Team at Google is here to help developers from any size company build great new applications. Email me if you have an application for the Google Apps Marketplace, or if you need help getting started.

Check out Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing

I will be writing as if I were using VMware View 4.0.1, Windows XP, and Windows 7 here. Hopefully, I can present things to be considering here that are NOT specific to any of the vendors, but are major considerations when rolling out any VDI solution in your organization.

Over the past 4 years, I have been involved with Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI from here in). When it first became a topic of discussion, lots of interest was there, but no true roadmap existed. Today, with many Connection Brokers available (VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Leostream, PanoLogic, etc), many different types of solutions exist. The result I am seeking is to present a desktop, along with all the applications that a user requires, so that the end users’ experience is VERY similar, if not identical, to that of a traditional PC. While keeping the user base happy, finding a way for the desktop teams to transition from reactive desktop support to proactive desktop planning is where we start to see the value from the investment you will make in a VDI solution.

When server virtualization was introduced, we saw dramatic improvements in the efficiency of our server teams’ ability to support large numbers of servers in the virtual world. We took away the risk associated with hardware tied to a physical operating system when virtualizing our servers. Now we look to realize the same benefits as we virtualize our desktops…increasing the ratio of administrators to operating systems they support as well as removing the risk of hardware tied to a specific operating system. This is the one variable that can be mitigated by running virtually, and I have seen the benefits time and time again over the past 10 years for the server infrastructure, and has become a reality for the desktops over the past 4 years as the technology has matured.

The End Result

When you take on your VDI project internally, you want an identical experience for the end users (their operating system that you support), more security and control over the data you are responsible for securing, an easier (or more proactive at least) method for managing the applications users need, and keeping the users’ identity consistent (the user’s profile from the Windows perspective). With thorough testing/Proof of Concept implementations, you will find you can deliver on these major requirements.

Acknowledging The Change In Desktop Teams’ Responsibilities

So here is a big change in the way the desktop team can work. It is a change because we start the transition from a mostly reactive desktop support model, to a proactive desktop support model. The changing of responsibility to manage, and update applications that end users require, maintaining the operating system that is the base of their experience, as well as maintaining the users’ profile is an enormous change in the way most desktop support teams work. It may seem that some of these items crossover into the server team’s responsibilities for some organizations, and that is very probably true. The transition of these responsibilities is inevitable. VERY similar to the way that traditional PBX systems have transitioned into VoIP systems that are maintained by server teams, and also use the same network that data traffic uses on the network, we are starting to see the individual silos of IT start to merge, and the responsibilities of the traditional teams realign.

Choosing a VDI Desktop Operating System For End Users

The first of 3 major components of the VDI solution.

This is always the easiest decision today. When considering the adoption of VDI for you infrastructure, let us change as few things as possible as we kick the tires on a new technology. Most organizations still use Windows XP as their primary desktop operating system, and understand all the little nuances that make it work (or break it, for that matter). So given that we all have a tremendous amount of experience with Windows XP, it is a very natural place to start with a desktop operating system to virtualize. Why would you try to learn a new operating system (anything other than Windows XP) while learning a new methodology to manage, deploy, and support the desktop operating system? Keep the variables in the Proof Of Concept to a minimum, so you can realize success.

Windows Vista…I don’t even consider it.

Windows 7 is a great next step for VDI. Once an organization grasps the new concepts of a VDI solution, it is much easier to then transition to Windows 7 as the underlying desktop operating system that is the base for the users we are supporting.

Managing The Users’ Data & Profile

The second of 3 major components of the VDI solution.

The user data, in my opinion, is one of the more important parts of the entire solution. When managing desktops, we want to make sure that we keep our users happy, whether it is keeping the users’ favorites/bookmarks, macros, or wallpaper, we want to make sure we can keep that user base happy.

There are many tools available to manage user profiles. Windows, VMware, Citrix, and many other 3rd party products provide this functionality. I like to keep things simple…I consider the use of Windows Roaming Profiles (wait….don’t be mad…let me explain).

Roaming profiles is a solution we are all familiar with, and have had varying degrees of acceptance with. In the days of desktops being scattered between multiple locations, or just all over the corporate headquarters, we had to rely on the network to deliver the Roaming Profile to the user before they could complete their login to the desktop. This could take a lot of time, especially if you are logging in from a remote location over a slow WAN link.

Roaming profile corruption can easily be solved by enable snapshots (from the SAN or from the Windows OS itself), so you can restore a profile from the day or two prior. I have seen profiles corrupt, but that is a minor one off issue that does not surface all the time.

Now, with our desktops living in the datacenter, having high-speed links, it would no longer take a long time for users to log in to their desktops. This would be true in a centralized model as well, where a remote site is using thin clients to connect to the desktop (which would actually reside in the datacenter back at headquarters), and the file servers are actually VERY local to the servers housing the users’ roaming profiles…

Now, this is not to say that this will be how all VDI solutions would be rolled out. Many companies explore other software packages that can manage the users’ profiles. What I am stating here, is similar to what I stated about choosing a desktop to kick the tires with…start with something you are very familiar with, and introduce as few variables as you explore new technologies.

Understanding & Publishing The Applications In Your Environment

The third of 3 major components of the VDI solution.

Application delivery is usually where you can invest the most time during the transition to a VDI solution. Many different technologies exist, and a hybrid solution can easily be what your organization requires to succeed.

Installing Applications Directly Into Each Virtual Machine

While this can still be done, and may be required by some applications, it is the traditional method of delivering applications to desktop operating systems. No learning curve here, but now considerations into how this would affect the delivery of desktops to users, and how much space is required to maintain the applications (now that we are using SAN disk, we need to be more conscious of how much space we consume, as SAN disk is somewhat expensive per GB). I like to acknowledge that this works, but I like to consider other options for delivery of the application stacks.

Delivering Applications via Terminal Services Published Applications

This is something that Windows Terminal Server teams and Citrix teams have done for many years. Put a shortcut on a user’s desktop, and that shortcut runs an application that is managed on a Terminal Server. This is a solution that still works wonderfully, because it keeps the actual application separated from the desktop operating system. I still recommend people consider this option for application delivery, even though it can raise the initial cost of the project (you will realize ROI as you maintain an application centrally at the Terminal Servers, rather than at the disparate desktops).

This is not a new technology, and has been in many IT organizations for the past decade. Why not consider it?

New Release Simplifies Management, Enhances Scalability and Expands High-Definition Support for Macs, Smart Phones and Microsoft Platforms

SANTA CLARA, CA — March 10, 2010 — Citrix Systems, Inc. today announced Citrix XenApp 6, the de facto standard for centralizing applications in the datacenter and delivering them as an on-demand service to both physical and virtual desktops. XenApp 6 offers major new enhancements that simplify computing for IT, including easier central management, enhanced enterprise scalability and seamless integration with Microsoft technologies like App-V and Windows Server 2008 R2. XenApp 6 also improves productivity for end users with extensive new high-definition HDX technology enhancements and simplified self-service access to apps from any device, including PCs, Macs, laptops and smart phones.

The new enhancements to XenApp 6 will also be available as an integrated feature of the company’s comprehensive desktop virtualization solution, Citrix XenDesktop 4. Mainstream adoption of desktop virtualization requires a proven, scalable solution with the ability to deliver any type of virtual desktop to any user on any device, and to be able to interchange delivery technologies at any time. With more than half the ROI of virtual desktops coming from centralized app management, this integration provides an unparalleled advantage over any other desktop virtualization solution on the market today. This powerful combination makes it easy for customers to deliver apps as an on-demand service to any user, on any device, across a broad range of both physical and virtual desktops.

Bill Burley, Group Vice President and General Manager, XenApp product group at Citrix

“Citrix XenApp 6 delivers an entirely new level of IT simplification and user experience that goes beyond anything we’ve ever done with XenApp. The new simplified management capabilities and increased scalability reduce the cost of application management by up to 50 percent for both physical and virtual desktop environments. Combined with Citrix Dazzle, the self-service enterprise app store, and broad new support for Macs, laptops and smart phones with Citrix Receiver, customers can now deliver apps as an on-demand service to any user in any location at a fraction of the cost of traditional application management.”

Garth Fort, General Manager of System Center Marketing, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp.

“With support for Windows Server 2008 R2 in XenApp 6 and new integration with Citrix XenApp and Microsoft App-V, we are providing increasing value to our customers and delivering a simplified yet powerful application delivery infrastructure. Customers can leverage their existing investment in Microsoft solutions while continuing to expand their ability to deliver applications on-demand.”

Key Facts and Highlights:

• Simplified Management – XenApp 6 dramatically simplifies desktop computing with AppCenter, a powerful new management console that makes it easy for IT to centrally manage all applications enterprise-wide from a single location.
• Unparalleled Scalability – XenApp 6 has been verified to scale up to more than 100,000 concurrent users in a single farm, giving customers unprecedented levels of cost savings and datacenter efficiency.
• Expanded Microsoft Integration – Seamless integration between XenApp 6 and Microsoft App-V makes it easy for customers to centrally manage applications using whatever mix of local and hosted solutions best fit their unique requirements. XenApp 6 also includes full support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, adding a broad range of platform enhancements including simplified provisioning, easier automation, and more efficient power consumption.
• Self-Service Apps – Through its integration with Citrix Dazzle, XenApp 6 gives users an entirely new level of flexibility and mobility, allowing them to choose the apps they need on-demand, without costly manual IT support. Apps available to users through the Dazzle “storefront” can include those delivered by XenApp or Microsoft App-V, as well as IT supported SaaS or web applications.
• Mac and Smart Phone Support – In addition to supporting PCs, thin clients and laptops, XenApp 6 now makes it easy for users to access Windows apps from Macs and popular smart phones such as Apple iPhone, Google Android and Windows Mobile.
• Enhanced High-Definition HDX Technology – XenApp 6 includes broad new HDX technology enhancements that allow customers to deliver real-time media applications like voice and CD-quality audio with a rich, high-definition user experience. New HDX enhancements in XenApp 6 also expand support for a broad range of USB devices, including webcams, microphones, digital cameras and scanners.

Pricing and Availability:
The new XenApp 6 release will be available for download beginning on March 24, 2010, and will be offered as a free upgrade to all XenApp customers with current Subscription Advantage agreements. Suggested list pricing for new licenses of XenApp 6 will begin at $350 per concurrent user. More information on the new features in XenApp 6 can be found at http://www.citrix.com/xenapp6.

XenApp 6 will also be included as an integrated feature of the company’s broader XenDesktop 4 product line, which is available to customers at a suggested list price beginning at $225 per-user or per-device.

About Citrix
Citrix Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of virtualization, networking and cloud computing solutions for more than 230,000 organizations worldwide. Its Citrix Delivery Center, Citrix Cloud Center (C3) and Citrix Online product families radically simplify computing for millions of users, delivering desktops and applications as an on-demand service to any user, in any location on any device. Citrix customers include the world’s largest Internet companies, 99 percent of Fortune Global 500 enterprises, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers worldwide. Citrix partners with over 10,000 companies worldwide in more than 100 countries. Founded in 1989, annual revenue in 2009 was $1.61 billion.

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

John and Ellen quickly raised a $7.4M Series A financing and recruited George Moberly (VP Product Management, formerly of Bladelogic) and Fred Olivera (Chief Architect, formerly of EMC). Shawn Henry (VP Engineering, formerly RSA) and John McEleney (CEO, formerly of SolidWorks) joined shortly thereafter. Outside investors were interested in the company and the management team received a pre-emptive $8M Series B financing a short 6 months after the A round.

What about your experience and history before CloudSwitch?
I have worked in the application software industry for over 20 years. I joined SolidWorks when it was approximately 20 employees and $0 in revenue. I was the CEO from 2001 to 2007, and during this period we tripled the business from approximately $100M to over $350M. I have a technical background, moved to sales and marketing and have been in senior management for approximately 15 years.

What market segments are you targeting?
CloudSwitch’s software can be used by enterprises in a wide range of industries. We are focusing on companies and industries that are likely to be the earlier adopters of public clouds. These tend to be medium to large enterprises that have existing data centers, with virtualization of at least a part of their servers and a desire to take advantage of the cost and agility benefits of the cloud.

Where did the company get its name?
As the name suggests, CloudSwitch is focused on helping companies who want to switch to the cloud, and to have the flexibility of switching between multiple clouds and their data centers.

Is there a person or company involved with Cloud storage that you admire or are keeping an eye on?
While CloudSwitch is not specifically in the cloud storage space, we think there are several great companies in this area, including Carbonite, Nasuni and Actifio.

Why create a new company? Aren’t there already many suppliers involved with leveraging the cloud?
As you would expect, with a computing platform shift like cloud computing, we’veseen a plethora of new companies with innovative offerings to help people take advantage of this new platform. Many companies are focused on providing public cloud services, or helping enterprises build their own internal clouds. At CloudSwitch we’ve taken the unique approach of extending the corporate data center out to the cloud through our CloudSwitch software appliance, enabling enterprises to take advantage of cloud computing securely, easily and affordable without changing their applications or management tools.

How is portability a concern on where you want to host your applications?
Without CloudSwitch, portability is a big challenge for enterprises, since they’d have to re-architect their applications for a specific cloud, and would then be locked into that cloud if they decided to move between clouds or back to the data center. With CloudSwitch, portability is not a concern, since our software automatically takes care of all of the logistics in moving a customer’s applications to the cloud.

When is the right time to move to the cloud?
Enterprise IT departments are struggling with costly, over-provisioned and un-responsive data centers. They are eager to find ways to move to the cloud to take advantage of its on-demand pricing and rapid, self-service provisioning. The cloud provides the ability to offload specific applications and avoid expensive build-outs, as well as to scale our capacity as needed for applications with short-term or cyclical demand, especially web and test/development apps. For most enterprises, the time to move to the cloud is now.

What things are holding cloud computing back from wider adoption. What issue is top-most in your mind and why?
It is very clear that the cloud as a compute platform is real and it is happening today. Like any major platform shift, people are going through a process to understand the benefits for their organization, the risks and the challenges. The single greatest perceived issue is security. Organizations are concerned, and rightfully so, about how secure their applications and data can be in the cloud. At CloudSwitch we designed our solution from the ground up to provide provable end-to-end security, including encryption of all data and communications, in transit and at rest, enterprise control over key management, and roles-based access controls for authorization and permissions.

How would you compare your firm with Enomaly, TwinStrata?
Enomaly and TwinStrata are in different segments of the cloud market. Both of these solutions are targeting the data storage segment. While CloudSwitch does deal with storage-related issues, we are focused on moving applications (with NO changes) to the cloud. As a result of moving these applications we can take the full stack (including data) or people can “stretch” the application from the cloud back to the data center.

For the technologist reading this or the “Cloud Champion” who appreciates “the deep dive”, can you tell this person something that he would really appreciate about your product/service?
Our patent-pending Cloud Isolation Technology enables seamless migration of applications to the cloud, and full isolation of the customer’s cloud resources, so they remain under enterprise control. In addition, we automatically create a layer 2 network to bridge between the data center and the cloud, so that the cloud-based applications retain their original data center IP addresses, identity, etc. and still look exactly as they did in the data center.

What channels are being used to sell CloudSwitch?
We are reaching out to customers directly via the internet as well as inside sales.

Do you have any OEM deals now or is this being looked at?
We are engaged in many discussions with many players.

As chief executive officer at CloudSwitch, John McEleney brings over two decades of experience in scaling software businesses to market leadership. Prior to joining CloudSwitch, John was the CEO of SolidWorks Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dassault Systems S.A. (NASDAQ: DASTY). John’s rise to CEO was built on his strong record of results over a 20-year career in the CAD industry. During his tenure as CEO, annual revenues grew from US $100 million in 2001 to over $350 million in 2007.

Before joining SolidWorks, John held management positions at Computervision, where he was involved in a wide array of functions including marketing and product development. John has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Rochester, a master’s degree in manufacturing systems from Boston University, and a master’s degree in business administration and marketing from Northeastern University.

• Physical to virtual conversion – vConverter SC
• Reporting on storage over-allocation – vOptimizer WasteFinder
• Ease of creation of scripting and admin functions – Virtualization EcoShell

vOptimizer WasteFinder

Scans through VMware vCenter Servers (formerly Virtual Center) to locate over allocated virtual storage and misaligned Virtual Machines (VMs). The vOptimizer WasteFinder Space and Alignment Report provides totals of wasted storage and also a potential savings estimate if the space is reclaimed.

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vConverter SC: Server Consolidation Freeware

Enterprise-class software that significantly reduces the time, cost, and effort required to convert physical and virtual machines to VMware®, Microsoft®, or XenServer™. vConverter SC is suitable for all types and sizes of server consolidation initiatives where several or even thousands of physical servers need to be virtualized.

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Free Desktop Application for Script-based Administration of Windows® PowerShell

Virtualization EcoShell™ is a freeware desktop application that enables IT administrators to unlock the full potential of their virtual infrastructure and reduce the daily operating costs of managing multi-platform environments.

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Register to watch or download this March 4th webinar on Virtualization as part of your DR-Plan.

Host: Brian Vendegrift, VP at Venyu
Duration: 39 Minutes 

According to leading IT analyst firm ESG, data backup and recovery remains 1 of the top 3 spending areas for 2010. Data backup and recovery as an industry has gone through major changes and continues to challenge IT as data volumes grow and new technologies emerge – such as virtualization. 

Brian Vandegrift, VP & Product Evangelist for Baton Rouge and Boston-based Venyu Solutions will help clear the air and explain what is “state-of-the-art” backup and recovery today. With so many businesses strapped for resources, it’s critical to make an educated decision that will serve your business today and years down the road.  

In this webinar, you will learn …
• The pros and cons of in-sourcing vs. outsourcing
• Best practice backup & recovery for virtual servers
• How is the “Cloud” applied to the world of backup and DR? 

Please enter your information and you’ll be forwarded to Venyu to download or watch the on demand webinar recording. 

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