Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Quest, HealthCast to Offer Virtualized End-to-End Clinical Desktop and Workflow Solution

by Leave a Comment

Quest Software and HealthCast today announced an end-to-end clinical desktop and workflow solution that simplifies and automates secure clinician access to protected healthcare information with the benefits of virtualization.

vWorkspace and eXactACCESS automate clinician access to and management of virtual desktops and applications by eliminating the need to enter multiple passwords to disparate systems. HealthCast’s unique proximity badge functionality automates the login to the virtual desktop and launches a clinician’s primary application based on who they are, and then navigates them to a default location within the application. When the badge is “tapped” again, the clinician’s virtual desktop and applications are disconnected so that clinicians can go to any other workstation in the enterprise, and securely pick up their desktop and applications exactly as they had left them with another “tap” of their badge.

Quest and HealthCast will be showcasing the vWorkspace and eXactACCESS solution at HIMSS10 – Healthcare IT Conference and Exhibition at booth #1362 on March 1-4 at Atlanta’s Georgia World Congress Center.

Quest vWorkspace is a seventh generation virtual desktop management suite which enables organizations to provision, deploy and manage a virtual desktop environment. Designed to reduce costs and security concerns and increase control of enterprise desktop environments, vWorkspace is flexible across VDI, remote desktop services/terminal services, and physical blade PCs, and supports all major hypervisors.

Phoenix Technologies Appoints Tom Lacey President and CEO

by Leave a Comment

Phoenix Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: PTEC), a global leader in core systems software, today announced that its Board of Directors has named Tom Lacey as the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer, effective as of February 25, 2010. Additionally, Mr. Lacey has been appointed to serve as a member of the company’s Board of Directors.
(Logo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070410/SFTU048LOGO)
“We are delighted that Tom has joined Phoenix,” said Jeffrey Smith, Chairman of the Board. “Tom brings three decades of engineering, marketing, sales and operational leadership experience to Phoenix, and has a record of driving profitability and growth in his prior roles at leading technology companies. Tom brings an extensive knowledge of Phoenix’s key customers and partners and we are confident that his leadership skills and industry relationships will drive shareholder value at Phoenix.”
Prior to joining Phoenix, Mr. Lacey served as corporate Vice President and General Manager of Applied Materials’ SunFab Thin Film Solar Products since 2009, where he was responsible for all aspects of the turnkey solar thin-film production business.  Prior to Applied Materials, from 2006 to 2007, Mr. Lacey was President of Flextronics International’s Components Group, an 8,000 employee division that designs and sells display, power system and camera cell phone modules. Mr. Lacey joined Flextronics in connection with the successful $300 million sale to Flextronics of International Display Works (IDW), a developer of LCD displays, where he served as Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer from 2004 to 2006. While at IDW, Mr. Lacey drove significant revenue and profitability growth and increased the market capitalization of IDW by approximately 6 times following a successful listing on NASDAQ.
Prior to IDW, Mr. Lacey had a distinguished 13 year career at Intel Corporation, where he held various management and executive positions of increasing responsibility, including Vice President Sales and Marketing, President of Intel Americas, where he was responsible for over $12 billion in sales and managed Dell, IBM, HP, Cisco Systems, Motorola and other critical accounts. In his last year at Intel, as Vice President and General Manager, Flash Products, Mr. Lacey grew revenues by $500 million to $2.3 billion with customers such as Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Motorola and others.
“I am very excited to join Phoenix. Phoenix has been at the core of the PC ecosystem for over 30 years and has developed valuable intellectual property assets and technology, long-standing relationships with all of the major OEMs, ODMs and silicon vendors in the industry, and unique firmware expertise and engineering competencies with extremely talented employees,” said Lacey. “The immediate focus for me at Phoenix is to ensure that the Company’s core business returns to its full potential so that Phoenix can continue to provide the most innovative solutions and services to its customers. I am confident in the prospects for Phoenix and look forward to working with the rest of the management team and Board of Directors to maximize value for all shareholders.”
Mr. Lacey succeeds Woodson Hobbs, who has served as Phoenix’s President and Chief Executive Officer since 2006. The Company also announced that Mr. Hobbs has resigned from the company’s Board of Directors.
In connection with his appointment, and as an incentive to his joining, Mr. Lacey was granted a non-qualified inducement stock option to purchase 400,000 shares of common stock of Phoenix, par value $0.001 per share, with an exercise price equal to $2.70 (USD), the closing sale price of the Company’s stock on February 25, 2010, the grant date. Assuming Mr. Lacey remains actively employed by Phoenix, the option will vest and become exercisable with respect to 1/48th of the total number of shares underlying the option each month after the grant date so that all of the shares will be fully vested on the four (4) year anniversary of the grant date. The vesting of the options will accelerate if Mr. Lacey’s employment is terminated without cause or for good reason after a change of control. Additionally, Mr. Lacey received an inducement grant of 425,000 shares of restricted stock on the grant date. The restricted stock vests as follows: 25,000 shares vested on the grant date, and 1/48th of the remaining shares vest monthly so that all of the shares of restricted stock will be fully vested on the four (4) year anniversary of the grant date. The vesting of all unvested restricted stock will accelerate if Mr. Lacey’s employment is terminated without cause or for good reason following a change of control. The inducement options and restricted shares were granted outside of the terms of any existing Phoenix equity incentive plan and without shareholder approval pursuant to NASDAQ Marketplace Rule 4350(i)(1)(A)(iv).

Phoenix Technologies today announced that its Board of Directors has named Tom Lacey as the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer, effective as of February 25, 2010.

Additionally, Mr. Lacey has been appointed to serve as a member of the company’s Board of Directors.

Prior to joining Phoenix, Mr. Lacey served as corporate Vice President and General Manager of Applied Materials’ SunFab Thin Film Solar Products since 2009, where he was responsible for all aspects of the turnkey solar thin-film production business.  Prior to Applied Materials, from 2006 to 2007, Mr. Lacey was President of Flextronics International’s Components Group, an 8,000 employee division that designs and sells display, power system and camera cell phone modules.

Mr. Lacey joined Flextronics in connection with the successful $300 million sale to Flextronics of International Display Works (IDW), a developer of LCD displays, where he served as Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer from 2004 to 2006. While at IDW, Mr. Lacey drove significant revenue and profitability growth and increased the market capitalization of IDW by approximately 6 times following a successful listing on NASDAQ.

Prior to IDW, Mr. Lacey had a distinguished 13 year career at Intel Corporation, where he held various management and executive positions of increasing responsibility, including Vice President Sales and Marketing, President of Intel Americas, where he was responsible for over $12 billion in sales and managed Dell, IBM, HP, Cisco Systems, Motorola and other critical accounts. In his last year at Intel, as Vice President and General Manager, Flash Products, Mr. Lacey grew revenues by $500 million to $2.3 billion with customers such as Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Motorola and others.

Mr. Lacey succeeds Woodson Hobbs, who has served as Phoenix’s President and Chief Executive Officer since 2006. The Company also announced that Mr. Hobbs has resigned from the company’s Board of Directors.

In connection with his appointment, and as an incentive to his joining, Mr. Lacey was granted a non-qualified inducement stock option to purchase 400,000 shares of common stock of Phoenix, par value $0.001 per share, with an exercise price equal to $2.70 (USD), the closing sale price of the Company’s stock on February 25, 2010, the grant date.

Assuming Mr. Lacey remains actively employed by Phoenix, the option will vest and become exercisable with respect to 1/48th of the total number of shares underlying the option each month after the grant date so that all of the shares will be fully vested on the four (4) year anniversary of the grant date. The vesting of the options will accelerate if Mr. Lacey’s employment is terminated without cause or for good reason after a change of control.

Marathon Technologies Stretches Series B Financing Round to $13.5M

by 1 Comment

Marathon Technologies has closed a third tranche of a $13.5 million round of Series B venture financing, according to a SEC filing.

The funding amount represents the total raised over three closings of a sale of Series B-1 convertible preferred stock, according to the regulatory filing, which was an amendment to a form filed in December 2008. The company, which makes fault tolerance software for mixed virtual and hardware environments, brought in the funding from 10 investors not disclosed in the filing.

In September, Littleton-based Marathon hired former IBM vice president Jim Welch as CEO. In August, the company raised $7 million in equity financing.

Founded in 1993, the company went through a bankruptcy reorganization in 2003. Since then, Marathon has raised at least $27.8 million from backers including Atlas Venture, Longworth Venture and Sierra Ventures.

VMware Buys $200 Million Worth Of Technology From Parent EMC

by Leave a Comment

VMware is to acquire select technologies from parent company EMC, reports TechCrunchIT.

The virtualization juggernaut will essentially be buying up certain technologies from EMC’s Ionix IT management business, including solutions aimed at delivering improved management and deployment of servers and applications in a virtualized data center. VMware will acquire all technology and intellectual property of FastScale, Application Discovery Manager, Server Configuration Manager and Service Manager.

As part of the agreement, EMC will retain the Ionix brand and have full reseller rights to continue to offer customers the products acquired by VMware.

The transaction is valued at $200 million and is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2010.

VMware Acquires “Certain Assets” From RTO Software

by Leave a Comment

VMware has acquired certain assets from RTO Software, a provider of user profile management for Windows desktop and application/performance monitoring tools for desktop virtualization, to enable effective persona management for VMware View.
RTO Software is a company with core expertise in user profile management and application-focused performance monitoring tools that improve user experience and performance of VDI or terminal server environments. RTO Software solutions are used on thousands of servers around the world in a variety of industries, including financial management, manufacturing, healthcare, telecommunications, and government.  RTO Software products include:
• Virtual Profiles – profile management
• PinPoint – application performance monitoring targeting Citrix solutions
• Discover – IT assets management solution
• TScale – applicaenvironments
VMware officially announced the acquisition with a blog post on their Community Web site under VMware View:
Today we are proud to announce that VMware has acquired the assets of Alpharetta, GA based RTO Software adding their technology and talented people to the VMware View team…
The RTO technologies add a critical component to the View solution providing the foundation for robust persona management.  With persona management end-user specific information such as user data, settings and application access is separated from the desktop image enabling increased flexible access and portability of the desktop service.  This integration will provide end-users with a consistent user experience while IT organizations will benefit from simplified and optimized management of these assets.
Scott Davis, the VMware View CTO gives a bit more clarification about what RTO offers with Virtual Profiles:
This is an exciting technology. For those unfamiliar with the specifics of what Virtual Profiles actually does, the technology seamlessly virtualizes, caches and synchronizes a desktop user’s roaming profile, while improving both the performance and data integrity of the profile. When a user logs on, instead of monolithically delivering the entire user profile and making the user wait for all of it, Virtual Profiles performs a “just-in-time” delivery. Windows thinks the entire profile is present, however the contents of each segment or file is brought down and subsequently cached when accessed.  When files are updated and closed, Virtual Profiles automatically synchronizes the files  with the profile server, maintaining data integrity across user sessions in real-time and speeding up logoffs.  This  preserves user configuration integrity independently of the desktop image; and also propagates those changes to any other concurrent user sessions that may exist, maintaining data integrity across sessions as well. Registry updates are handled in a similar manner; but at finer granularity. Profile registry changes are automatically synchronized with the stored profile on the server. Since only what has been written to the registry locally is copied back, hive corruption is prevented.

VMware has acquired certain assets from RTO Software, a provider of user profile management for Windows desktop and application/performance monitoring tools for desktop virtualization, to enable effective persona management for VMware View.

RTO Software is a company with core expertise in user profile management and application-focused performance monitoring tools that improve user experience and performance of VDI or terminal server environments. RTO Software solutions are used on thousands of servers around the world in a variety of industries, including financial management, manufacturing, healthcare, telecommunications, and government.  RTO Software products include:

• Virtual Profiles – profile management

• PinPoint – application performance monitoring targeting Citrix solutions

• Discover – IT assets management solution

• TScale – applicaenvironments

Scott Davis, the VMware View CTO gives a bit more clarification about what RTO offers with Virtual Profiles:

This is an exciting technology. For those unfamiliar with the specifics of what Virtual Profiles actually does, the technology seamlessly virtualizes, caches and synchronizes a desktop user’s roaming profile, while improving both the performance and data integrity of the profile. When a user logs on, instead of monolithically delivering the entire user profile and making the user wait for all of it, Virtual Profiles performs a “just-in-time” delivery.

Windows thinks the entire profile is present, however the contents of each segment or file is brought down and subsequently cached when accessed.  When files are updated and closed, Virtual Profiles automatically synchronizes the files  with the profile server, maintaining data integrity across user sessions in real-time and speeding up logoffs.  This  preserves user configuration integrity independently of the desktop image; and also propagates those changes to any other concurrent user sessions that may exist, maintaining data integrity across sessions as well. Registry updates are handled in a similar manner; but at finer granularity.

Profile registry changes are automatically synchronized with the stored profile on the server. Since only what has been written to the registry locally is copied back, hive corruption is prevented.

AutoVirt Names Thomas Fraser VP of Sales

by Leave a Comment

AutoVirt™, Inc., the leading provider of file virtualization solutions for Windows data migration and management, today announced that it has appointed Thomas Fraser to the newly created position of Vice President of Sales.  Reporting directly to AutoVirt’s President and CEO, Josh Klein, Fraser will be responsible for developing and executing the global sales and channel strategy, establishing and directing the external sales force, as well as growing and overseeing the inside sales team.
“I am excited to join AutoVirt during such a critical stage of the company’s evolution,” said Fraser.  “Its recent release of AutoVirt v3.0 with innovative enhancements in areas such as storage automation policies, independent namespaces and extended platform interoperability reinforced its position as the leading solution for helping customers to control the exponential growth of their unstructured file data.  With further significant developments soon to be released, it’s time to take the sales effort to the next level.  I am thrilled to have the opportunity to play a key role in that process.”
“We are delighted and count ourselves very fortunate to add a sales executive of Thom’s caliber to the management team,” said Klein.  “Thom’s extensive sales expertise – from both a strategic planning and execution standpoint, and wide-ranging industry relationships will prove invaluable as AutoVirt moves into the next significant stage of the company’s growth and development.”
With over 25 years of domestic and international IT industry experience, in both direct and channel sales management positions – across the enterprise messaging, knowledge management and security markets, Thomas Fraser enjoys a unique depth and breadth of expertise.  Prior to joining AutoVirt, Fraser served as Vice President of Sales at Panda Security, a leading provider of cloud-based security solutions with products available in more than 23 languages and millions of users located in 195 countries around the world.  In this position, Fraser increased total sales by 21% while growing channel sales by over 35% year-over-year.  Prior to Panda Security, Fraser held the position of Vice President of Sales at Kaspersky Lab, an innovative developer of information security solutions that protect customers from a wide range of IT threats and enable enterprises to better manage risk.  In this position, Fraser was responsible for building the channel sales team from the ground up, as well as the VAR channel strategy.  Results included year-over-year channel sales growth-rates ranging from 192% to 446%.  Previously, Fraser held senior domestic and international sales management positions with Entegrity Solutions – during which time he increased average sales productivity by 225%; Beyond Inc. – where he successfully established the company’s international sales channels across Europe, Asia and Latin America; and Lotus – where his regions consistently ranked #1 in both direct and reseller sales revenue.  Thom Fraser graduated with honors from The University of Edinburgh, having majored in Business and Psychology.

AutoVirt today announced that it has appointed Thomas Fraser to the newly created position of Vice President of Sales.  R

eporting directly to AutoVirt’s President and CEO, Josh Klein, Fraser will be responsible for developing and executing the global sales and channel strategy, establishing and directing the external sales force, as well as growing and overseeing the inside sales team.

With over 25 years of domestic and international IT industry experience, in both direct and channel sales management positions – across the enterprise messaging, knowledge management and security markets, Thomas Fraser enjoys a unique depth and breadth of expertise.

Prior to joining AutoVirt, Fraser served as Vice President of Sales at Panda Security, a leading provider of cloud-based security solutions with products available in more than 23 languages and millions of users located in 195 countries around the world.  In this position, Fraser increased total sales by 21% while growing channel sales by over 35% year-over-year.  Prior to Panda Security, Fraser held the position of Vice President of Sales at Kaspersky Lab, an innovative developer of information security solutions that protect customers from a wide range of IT threats and enable enterprises to better manage risk.

In this position, Fraser was responsible for building the channel sales team from the ground up, as well as the VAR channel strategy.  Results included year-over-year channel sales growth-rates ranging from 192% to 446%.  Previously, Fraser held senior domestic and international sales management positions with Entegrity Solutions – during which time he increased average sales productivity by 225%; Beyond Inc. – where he successfully established the company’s international sales channels across Europe, Asia and Latin America; and Lotus – where his regions consistently ranked #1 in both direct and reseller sales revenue.

Fraser graduated with honors from The University of Edinburgh, having majored in Business and Psychology.