virtualisation

NetQoS Expands Partnerships Globally

November 4, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

NetQoS has expanded its global reseller and system integrator network with new partnerships in Africa, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Latin America. Combined with a dedicated NetQoS international sales team, the partnerships will help NetQoS build and support its growing global client base with products and services that enable large organizations to optimize their networks for application performance.

In Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, NetQoS is working with MICROmega Technologies (MMT), based in Johannesburg, South Africa. MMT will help NetQoS expand its regional presence through an established network of Cisco Gold Partners and the expertise to deploy and integrate the NetQoS Performance Center in customer environments.

NetQoS is also expanding its presence in Asia Pacific through a strategic partnership with NetFrontier. Working closely with NetFrontier, NetQoS will build on its success in the region by helping companies in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan improve network performance and application delivery.

In addition to new partnerships in emerging markets, NetQoS has expanded its European sales efforts recently with new partnerships in France, Sweden, and the UK. NetQoS complements its reseller network with direct sales staff in the UK, Germany, and Singapore. During the first half of 2008, NetQoS increased EMEA revenues 160 percent year-over-year.

Virtual Bridges Adds VERDE To Win4VDI Product Family

November 4, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virtual Bridges, a provider of desktop and enterprise virtualization solutions for education and business, announced today the release of a new product in its Win4VDI family. Virtual Bridges’ VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) is a platform for consolidating Linux desktops on x86-based Linux and Solaris servers.

VERDE uses ordinary thin clients for end-points. Organizations benefit from reduced energy consumption, fewer points of failure, and increased security when compared to traditional desktop environments. The VERDE stack further facilitates desktop management through the use of powerful virtual machine technology.

Through Virtual Bridges’ work on virtual desktop computing with hundreds of thousands of users, the company has crafted a product that delivers all of the core features a typical organization would require to accomplish their IT goals. Features like automatic local printing, one-click Windows installation, the ability to integrate with Active Directory, availability of web display or third-party display options, use of write-protected Windows system images for true malware resistance, and integration of RDP support, are just some of the features that combine to put Win4VDI in the lead of the desktop virtualization and consolidation market.

Win4VDI, Virtual Bridges’ Educational/SMB and enterprise product, allows an organization to easily and cost-effectively deliver multiple Windows desktop sessions to PCs, Workstations and thin clients from a non-Windows server such as Linux and Solaris OS.

Maintaining and upgrading desktop computers physically distributed across an organization is a difficult and slow process that is also not effective for users who find themselves with aging computers with degraded performance. VERDE offers IT organizations the ability to easily deploy “desktop as a service” across the organization for both fixed-function as well as custom desktop users, all from a central location, reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of desktop computing.

VERDE allows organizations to standardize the application environment to users regardless of desktop hardware and operating system – Windows, UNIX, Linux or Mac can be used on the client, but a common application profile can be created and served from VERDE server configurations such as blade servers, rack arrays or large multi-way machines.

The VERDE product is available immediately.

Industry Moves: Rashied Akrum And Carina Rozendaal Join InstallFree

November 3, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

InstallFree today announced that long time Application and Desktop Virtualization veterans Rashied Akrum and Carina Rozendaal will join InstallFree as the Vice President EMEA and Senior Director of Sales & Marketing EMEA respectively.

Both Akrum and Rozendaal bring a tremendous amount of experience to InstallFree, having previously worked at Microsoft through the acquisition of Softricity in July 2006. Prior to the acquisition, they established and ran the EMEA Headquarters for Softricity for 4 years and were instrumental in creating the Application and Desktop Virtualization market in EMEA while developing a strong channel presence.

Akrum has over 21 years experience in IT leadership roles and has been successful in building European channels for new emerging IT technologies. He has extensive experience in sales, marketing, technical and management positions in software infrastructure and virtualization technologies including Softricity, Citrix, Terminal Server and MS Virtualization.

Rozendaal is a long time software virtualization pioneer having worked at Microsoft and established the EMEA market for Softricity with Akrum. She has extensive experience in the areas of sales, business development and marketing within infrastructure and virtualization technologies like Softricity, Citrix and Terminal Server. Rozendaal also brings her experience in channels in emerging technologies across Europe, Middle East & Africa with companies like CDG Europe, ASG Europe and Racal-Datacom.

Matrox Announces Multi-Monitor Support for Desktop Virtualization Environments using Citrix ICA and/or Microsoft RDP Protocols

November 3, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Matrox Graphics announces that Remote PowerDesk and Remote PowerSpace software are now supported with Matrox P690 Series graphics cards, in addition to the already supported Matrox Epica Series. These multi-display software suites provide extensive desktop management capabilities to improve the user experience with multi-monitor desktops hosted virtually using Microsoft RDP or Citrix ICA protocols.

Previously only available with Epica cards, Remote PowerDesk and Remote PowerSpace provide users of any remote platform with P690 add-in cards a vastly improved remote multi-display user experience. Advanced desktop management features such as Desktop Divider, window maximization to a single screen, window position recall, and virtual workspaces allow users to customize application behavior across multiple monitors.

Best-of-breed 2D image quality, unified drivers, and maximum power consumption ranging between 10W and 12W makes the P690 Series ideal for use in green computing environments, thin clients, fat clients (desktops), and docking stations.

Matrox P690 Series graphics cards are available immediately through their authorized resellers worldwide. Remote PowerDesk and Remote PowerSpace are available free of charge for Epica or P690 customers.

Roger Baskerville Leaves Citrix / XenSource

November 2, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Roger Baskerville has left Citrix, where he started out as the Sales Director of Xensource EMEA , after the Citrix merger to become Regional Director Northern Europe Server Virtualization .

During his years at Xensource Roger was one of the first commercial pushers of Xen and later XenEnterprise.

Roger has now joined Vizioncore as Vice President for EMEA and he will be responsible for EMEA operations. He leads the sales, marketing and systems engineering teams based across the region. Baskerville has held a variety of senior channel focused EMEA sales leadership positions with both mature high tech organizations as well as start-up operations. Previous companies include LightPointe, Palm, Compaq and NCR. A seasoned industry speaker who is both technically astute and sales focussed, Baskerville brings with him a wealth of experience in virtualization and international sales.

Earlier this year Quest fully acquired VizionCore as part of their journey into virtualization, after earlier
already owning a smaller part of the company. VizionCore then was described as the leading provider of disaster recovery and other products for virtual infrastructure management.

Today their website reads
“VizionCore Inc. provides software that helps organizations safeguard and optimize their virtualized environments and allows them to extract the maximum return on their investment in the VMware platform. Vizioncore’s software products support essential IT strategies, including business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery.”

With this move Roger stays in the Virtualization world where he has worked for the past couple of years, however moving from a fully Open Source based technology to a back to a proprietary environment.

The bigger question however is .. who else will be leaving Citrix/ XenSource. and when ? XenSource has been with Citrix for about a year now .. maybe there are other people jumping ship.

VMware Set To Slash Software Prices By 10%

November 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

According to Microscope, VMware will slash its list price by 10% from Monday. Matt Piercy, senior director of OEM alliances EMEA confirmed the price reduction.

This cancels out a 10% rise the virtualisation behemoth introduced on 1 September, which combined with the rallying of the US currency has made VMware less competitive, particularly against Microsoft, said partners.

…

Sources close to the vendor said VMware had not predicted the sweeping moves in the currencies at the time of the September price rise which was making its products appear to be around 20% more expensive.

Hat tip to Alessandro.