User virtualization in the Cloud

 As the Cloud matures into a viable platform and people start considering delivering applications and desktops from the Cloud then being able to deliver user environments both internally and externally becomes even more important.

First, let’s recap a little on the essential nature of the Cloud. First and foremost Cloud is a different business model for providing computing, all the technology requirements spring from the business model. Cloud is a utility model where you can buy the services you need for the period you need them and then, if you choose, stop buying them. This contrasts with the way people have typically paid for IT: Buying machines and software which we then own but may not always need. One of the key effects of the Cloud model is that customers are free to move from one provider to another for some or all of their users and to buy different services from different providers. So, for example, email could be bought from one provider while word processing, etc. could be bought elsewhere. What is more not all services have to externally provided, you can choose to treat your internal IT as a cloud – referred to as an ‘internal cloud’.

With these thoughts in mind let’s look at how Cloud will change user virtualization. In the case of an internal cloud not much changes compared to what we do today for desktop virtualization. In exactly the same way as we currently deliver user environments into hosted virtual desktops to configure and personalize them we will  do the same for desktops and applications in our internal clouds. For external clouds the most practical solution will probably be to deliver from users’ environments to each cloud provider because it gives flexibility to buy services from multiple cloud providers. Longer term there are other ways that may become practical but which still do not change the basic idea of managing a user’s environment separate from the platform in which it is used. So while Cloud would seem to be completely different some aspects remain the same as today. Also crucially, the work done today to componentize as part of desktop virtualization is an enabler for the use of future models such as Cloud.

Martin Ingram.

The Windows 7 Migration Challenge Events.

Esteem, a leading Citrix and AppSense partner in the UK are hosting a series of seminars, workshops and conferences to help keep you up to date with the latest strategy trends best practices and technology developments.  Working with Citrix, Microsoft and AppSense, Esteem will be travelling the UK to bring Windows 7 migration and deployment to your organization.

Please find an overview of the upcoming events below, along with the links to the event pages for more information and to register your attendance.

The Windows 7 Migration Challenge – London, 23rd March 2010
About:
This interactive workshop will examine Windows 7, discuss the key challenges associated with the deployment of it (including application compatibility issues), and review the impact it will have on the corporate desktop environment.

Presenters:
Keith Baker, Microsoft
Michael Fitzgerald, Esteem Systems
Matt Crenchley, Citrix Systems
Nigel Wilson, AppSense

The Windows 7 Migration Challenge – Leeds, 24th March 2010
About:
This interactive workshop will examine Windows 7, discuss the key challenges associated with the deployment of it (including application compatibility issues), and review the impact it will have on the corporate desktop environment.

Presenters:
Keith Baker, Microsoft
Michael Fitzgerald, Esteem Systems
Matt Crenchley, Citrix Systems
Nigel Wilson, AppSense

The Windows 7 Migration Challenge – Edinburgh, 25th March 2010
About:
This interactive workshop will examine Windows 7, discuss the key challenges associated with the deployment of it (including application compatibility issues), and review the impact it will have on the corporate desktop environment.

Presenters:
Keith Baker, Microsoft
Michael Fitzgerald, Esteem Systems
Matt Crenchley, Citrix Systems
Nigel Wilson, AppSense

Details of other AppSense attended events can be found here.

Congratulations to VMware and RTO software

Congratulations to all at RTO software – Further to VMware announcing they OEM’d RTO Virtual Profiles back at VMworld 2009,  Vmware has just announced that they have bought three of their products for incorporation into View. RTO goes forward with Tscale, their performance management product and they will presumably continue to innovate with more products in the future.

Congratulations to VMware. You now have a profile management solution gets you base level personalization and the possibility to extend what you have bought over time.

I have been saying for quite some time that base level personalization is a must-have for all desktop virtualization vendors – it is a glaring omission if it is not present. But personalization is only a small part of user virtualization and VMware will have their work cut out if they want to deliver all aspects of the user environment at enterprise scale.

More critically though, there is a fundamental problem in a user virtualization solution that only works across a single vendor’s products – there is no such thing as a single vendor customer. Customers already have a mix of different technologies serving their users: Desktops, Laptops, server based computing, application virtualization and an increasing proportion of hosted virtual desktops. In the future they will have client virtualization and other technologies, maybe layering, maybe images on a stick. Unless all the technologies come from the single vendor, VMware in this case, then customers will have to manage the user environment in different ways for each technology – an expensive and wasteful approach.

User virtualization solutions must deliver across all platforms in the business.

Martin Ingram

Nigel Wilson, AppSense, Wins 2010 Channel Chief

Nigel (niggle-wiggle) Wilson, AppSense Head of Channel awarded 2010 Channel Chief by Everything Channel’s CRN.

If you in anyway work with AppSense at a Channel Partner level, you will undoubtedly know, or at least will have heard of, Nigel Wilson… (hopefully for good things :) )

I ask you to please join me in congratulating Nigel in being recognized as 2010 Channel Chief by Everything Channel’s CRN.  This is one of the most prestigious channel awards in the IT industry, and both Nigel and AppSense are extremely proud to be on the receiving end of this highly regarded award.

We are pleased to receive this award as it highlights the valuable work we do with our channel partners, who without we would not have seen record growth in license and revenue for 2009.   (Plus, a commercially focused award is always nice to help balance out the several technology and product based awards Environment Manager has also won over the last couple of months too ;) )

Despite the award, the ever so modest Nigel says he is thrilled to win however feels he has only done 10% of what he has planned for our Channel, and that 2010 and see will see a hell of a lot more.. so watch this space.

AppSense have published a press release on this win, which can be found on the official AppSense website here.

For now, thanks again to our ever supporting channel…

User Installed Applications (UIA) by any other name?

As technologies continue to evolve, so does the terminology we use to refer to and describe them.  As many of us have experienced, terminology can be a minefield, with many discussions based on a difference of opinion on terms, rather than on what the term actually means.  For example, ‘VDI’ was first coined to describe an instance of a virtual desktop session running on a server.  However most people today use VDI in reference to a broader set of desktop delivery mechanisms; encompassing SBC, streamed apps, provisioned OS, client hosted desktops etc. 

Another term that has been used (and misused) recently is ‘User Installed Applications’ also known as, ‘UIA’.

OK, so here’s my definition:  UIA is the ability for a user to install an application into a non-persistent desktop session and then have that application made available in any other non-persistent desktop session – regardless of how that session is delivered.  That means the application must be isolated and treated as part of the user’s personal environment (a ‘follow me’ app if you like).

For example;
UIA use case.
A user installs an application or plug-in/add-on into either a non-persistent virtual desktop session, a SBC hosted session or even on their physical device.  As part of that application install, UIA technology  automatically captures, virtualizes, redirects and installs it into a central repository (e.g. a network share).  This application is then made available (with all application settings such as desktop or quick-launch shortcut and personalization settings) in any other freshly provisioned virtual desktop session.  So in stateless desktop virtualization, users can now install applications, have them saved and subsequently delivered into their next desktop session, even though the desktop is deleted at logoff and then freshly provisioned at next logon.

The purpose of this post is not to promote the need for UIA technology, that’s been covered quite frequently (Demo Video of the AppSense UIA Beta Product at BriForum 2009 , AppSense blog post on Citrix.com – User Installed Applications  and also here on the AppSense blog – What is a User Installed Application? ).  What I want to cover in this post is that even at a vendor level, UIA terminology is being misrepresented at a feature naming level, leading to confusion within the community.

I was recently reviewing a new version of an existing profile management solution, which in the latest release has a new feature called ‘User Installed Applications’.   On further inspection, it turned out that this was not UIA as I understand it, but was in fact, just a simple rename of an existing feature of that product that enables a (nominated) user to install an application into an native OS.   Now this is an important feature, but it’s not UIA!  It does not capture, virtualize and redirect the install.  It does not isolate the application.  It does not deliver the application back into another desktop session.

UIA is undoubtedly an important piece of the puzzle for desktop virtualization and is something that several vendors, AppSense included, are working on.  It is unfortunate, however, that as we all work towards a more complete solution for desktop virtualization, there has to be these points of confusion thrown in for seems like little material gain.

I look forward to the proposed User Environment Management Shoot Out at BriForum ( as per Aaron Parker, StealthPuppy - http://twitter.com/stealthpuppy ) where not only can all the vendors in this space demonstrate some significant progress in managing the user aspect of the desktop, but we can (hopefully) come to an agreement in terminology.  At least for the really impactful capabilities such as UIA.

AppSense Invited To The French Club Citrix User Group

In light of the strong Citrix + AppSense relationship and joint market activities, are now also pleased to be invited to be part of the French Club Citrix User Group in 2010.   This group is a key fountain of knowledge, providing information on Citrix product updates, best practices, cases studies to end users.  With end-user also given the opportunity to provide feedback to Citrix themselves.

AppSense join Citrix, Miel (a leading Citrix Distributor), DataCore and Wyse as the event group sponsors.

There are 4 events currently scheduled for 2010, all hosted at Citrix Paris:

March 25th – Link for more information and to register
June 24th
September 23rd
December 9th

I will provide more information on the events in due course, however please do feel free to ask if you have any questions in the mean time.

Link To Event Details

Protecting Administrators from themselves

We all insist, as far as we can, that our end-users are not administrators. Or at least I really hope we do. There are a number of pieces of research that show how the cost of administration rises dramatically when users are given administrative rights as they are then able to wreak havoc over the once nicely locked down, and functioning, system.

However, what about those of us who are administrators because we do indeed trust ourselves? We all naturally run anti-virus products and possibly a few other products too that will offer some protection such as personal firewalls and VPN clients. But what do we actually need to protect ourselves from? There will always be the silly/accidental/idiotic file or folder deletion, which is why we have confirmation dialogs and backups, but what is there to stop us from running potentially malicious, trojaned, code, particularly if it manifests itself as something legitimate such as an executable called notepad.exe with the right icon and other trimmings? Not all malware unfortunately is classed as such by anti-virus vendors and there is always a window of opportunity between malware being released into the wild and anti-virus signatures being available that blocks them.

Enter the AppSense Application Manager product and its “Self-Authorization” feature. As you may know, Application Manager has a powerful feature called “Trusted Ownership Checking” which allows an out of the box configuration to instantly protect against malware threats without the tedium of white lists, black lists or  (frequent) signature updates. It achieves this by looking at the owner of any executable file, and any file that is not owned by a Trusted User or Group, as in an account that we expect to own the executables we wish to execute, such as “Administrators” or “System”, is prevented from running.

Whilst administrators generally do not subject themselves to the full protection of Application Manager by making themselves “restricted” users, as they feel it may make their job harder, there is a “half way house” between being a “restricted” and “unrestricted” user – This is the “Self-Authorizing” user.  Any attempts to execute files, which includes scripts and dll’s as well as .exe’s, will produce a pop-up warning that the file is not owned by a “Trusted Owner” and asking if the file should be allowed to execute or not.

You must still however, when presented with the pop-up message, make the decision as to whether you trust the file you are about to execute or install.  For example, a non-administrative, restricted user downloads a (seemingly legitimate) file/installer and asks you as a (Self Authorizing) Administrator to install the application for them as they are prevented from doing so by Trusted Ownership Checking.  You will of course expect to see the pop-up message as you attempt to execute the file, but you must now ask yourself  if you really do trust this user, and that they have not accidentally downloaded malware.

Secondly, if you are running a standard tool on your Windows build and an Application Manager Self-Authorization dialogue is unexpectedly seen, then this should set alarm bells ringing and the reason for the dialogue should be investigated before the file is run, just in case it is malware and has a nasty payload.

In the example above, I was in a command prompt window as a local administrator (actually started via a “Run As” since I was logged on interactively as a non-administrator, naturally) and I needed to run regedit, as you do. Little did I know, in this ever so slightly contrived scenario, that there was already a regedit.exe executable in that folder. Obviously the dialogue tells me where the executable resides so I know immediately that I am not running what I thought I was. On a Terminal Server/XenApp server or a shared workstation, this could easily happen, either accidentally or deliberately. You could of course set the global SafeDllSearchMode registry value (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682586(VS.85).aspx) to stop this particular threat but this is just one example of a number of ways that you could unwittingly run programs that you didn’t actually want to.

Similarly, also watch out for PATH environment variables that have potentially untrustworthy folders in them, particularly when they precede key folders such as %systemroot% and %systemroot%\system32. Or just use Application Manager with the self-authorization feature for your administrative users.

Commaxx and AppSense: Migrating to Windows 7 while simplifying desktop management

Commaxx, a leading Norwegian Distributor, and AppSense are hosting a seminar to show how you can ensure a seamless and low-risk migration to Win7 along with ongoing simplified desktop management.  The following topics and more will be covered through workshops, demonstrations and discussion;

-          Business reasons for moving to Windows 7
-          Deployment options and challenges
-          Best practice
-          Assessing physical and virtual desktop options

When & Where:

Date: March 10^th 2010
Time: 08:30am – 11:30am
Location: Oslo

Click here for more information and to register.

DV Adoption – It’s all about the user experience

I was reading recently a blog entry by Bruce Hoard over at the Virtualization Review.  Titled 2010: A watershed year for VDI, the article talks about the results of a survey of some 1500 IT execs about implementing desktop virtualization.  I think many people agree that 2010 will be the proof-year for VDI (65.7% of respondents in this case), but what was interesting about this survey was the degree to which respondents were highlighting user experience as critical to the success of their VDI roll-outs.  From “factors used to evaluate success of VDI projects” (83% said end “user experience”) to “likely obstacles to full scale VDI deploy” (answer…”user resistance to giving up existing desktops”) it seems evident that regardless of the business model and technologies you are planning to use for your VDI project, compromising the user experience in any way makes those considerations moot. 

So what composes the user experience?  Well, there’s performance for one….a slower desktop is bad news.  Mobility in HVD is another…..”what do you mean I can’t take my desktop home?”, and of course a predictable and personal working experience is another. 

Making the move from physical to virtual (or mixed) environments promises to bring increased flexibility, better business planning capabilities, and higher levels of productivity (oh and maybe reduced cost?!).  So why shouldn’t it not just create a similar user experience to the PC, but a better one?  With better network protocols, accessing devices, operating systems and applications, why shouldn’t the user experience improve with virtualization? 

We see customers who have implemented our user virtualization technology providing better experiences to their users – not just the same as the PC.  For example, a consistent personal desktop experience from anywhere at any time (“you mean my work and home PCs can have the same look and feel without me doing anything?”), the ability to still have a fully personalized VDI desktop when not on the company network, even the ability to take your ‘personality’ with you across geographic, OS, accessing device and contextual boundaries without it having to be tied to one monolithic desktop.  Since with user virtualization the personality is managed independent of the desktop, the underlying ‘corporate’ OS and apps are freshly provided every time access is required, hence they are always new, clean and up-to-date – no build up of trash! Nice! 

Combining user virtualization technology with improved protocols, accessing devices, OS’s, apps and delivery mechanisms is a proven ‘best practice’ approach to ensuring that this most important of considerations is nailed from day one.  Don’t implement VDI without it!

Pete Rawlinson, VP Marketing, AppSense

AppSense Experiences Record Revenue Growth: 1Million Licenses Sold in 2009, Secures 20% of the Global VDI Market and Increases US Presence

We here at AppSense are delighted to look back on 2009 as our most successful year in our 10 year history.  Despite economic downfall and lots of uncertainty, enhancements to AppSense technologies have lead to record sales which when totalled, have been sold into almost 20% of the total number of virtual desktop seats sold by Citrix and VMWare in 2009!  And this 20% doesn’t include our sales into other platforms such as XenApp and Physical Desktop, which amounts to over 1million software licenses sold in 2009!!

This is a huge achievement, and further validation of:

1.  The importance of user virtualization solutions in the successful adoption of desktop virtualization.
2.  Shows AppSense as a clear leader in the user virtualization space.

Thanks to all who have made 2009 a great success and look forward to your continued support in 2010.

Please find below a press release taken, which is also hosted on the official AppSense website here.

AppSense Increases US Presence and Experiences Record Revenue Growth in 2009

11 February 2010

New York, NY – February 16, 2010 – AppSense, the leading provider of user virtualization solutions for the enterprise, today announced record US revenue growth in 2009, including a substantial increase in the number of desktop virtualization product licenses sold during the year.

In 2009, AppSense sold 170,000 licenses of its user virtualization software for virtual desktops, representing close to 20 percent of all virtual desktops sold globally, and over 60 percent of all componentized virtual desktop seats sold. This resulted in a 45 percent increase in AppSense US revenue last year. AppSense products are used in a wide-range of industries, and 2009 growth showed specific traction in financial services, healthcare, higher education and public sector.

Within the last year, AppSense has also dramatically increased its presence in the US, opening a headquarters in New York City and technology center in Palo Alto, California. The addition of these new offices has increased the company’s US employee base by 50 percent.

“AppSense is continuing to build on the tremendous success we experienced this past year, and is focused on increasing our resources in the US and globally to invest in the future of the company and technology,” said Charles Sharland, CEO at AppSense. “User virtualization is now firmly established as being essential to the adoption of virtual desktops within the enterprise. As the clear leader in this space, our goal is to continue to deliver award-winning technology and support that provides maximum value to our customers and partners around the world.”

AppSense user virtualization technology enables corporate desktops to be personalized without the need for cumbersome profiles or scripts. From server-based computing environments through to virtual and physical desktops, user virtualization ensures users always receive a consistent, predictable and personalized working experience. Full desktops can now be configured and business rules applied on-demand, enabling compliant, personalized desktops to be quickly delivered to thousands of users. AppSense technology is used in conjunction with many third party systems integrators, including CSC, HP, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens and IBM.

“We see 2010 as being a transformative year for the desktop,” said Martin Ingram, VP Strategy at AppSense. “We are seeing an increasing number of our customers moving towards a component-based desktop. With this comes the need to independently manage the user aspect of the desktop. That is user virtualization.”

In addition to record growth, AppSense was also honored with a number of industry awards including Best Desktop Virtualization Solution in the Best of VMworld awards, Desktop Software Product of the Year at the Techworld Awards, and the Silver award in the Desktop Virtualization category for the SearchServerVirtualization.com 2009 Product of the Year Awards.

What Customers are Saying about AppSense
Greg Matuskovic, IT director for EMB America: “In order to achieve user acceptance of the move to VDI, we needed to make sure the virtual environment looked just like a physical desktop – just without the performance issues. The AppSense solution actually performed better than we ever imagined. Crucially, AppSense Environment Manager does what roaming profiles could not achieve. It allows our consultants to work on multiple machines using one profile without impacting stability. We now run AppSense on all our virtual machines.”

Andy Fisher, manager of technical services at University of Texas Medical Branch: “The decision to implement AppSense was very easy for us. From a product perspective we felt that the interface was easy to administer, intuitive, and well designed. We were also impressed by the way the AppSense team whole-heartedly backed their product and we were very pleased with the level of pre-sales service AppSense provided. The team responded to our technical issues accurately, assessed our environment thoroughly and provided demonstrations and face-to-face assistance at all times.”

About AppSense
AppSense, the leading provider of user virtualization solutions for enterprises, makes physical and virtual desktop deployment possible by ensuring a seamless user experience across all delivery platforms. AppSense accelerates multi-platform desktop deployments by eliminating costly user management tools, enabling single-image application delivery, and ensuring users have the same experience from any desktop. AppSense technology is used around the world by companies such as JPMorgan Chase, Lowes, United Airlines, Wachovia, Wal-Mart, ESPN and CB Richard Ellis. AppSense has offices in New York and Palo Alto in the US, London and Manchester in the UK, and additional offices in Munich, Melbourne and Amsterdam.