LANDesk Software executives are saying the company is ready for Vista virtualization.
The company’s zero-footprint application virtualization package, called LANDesk Application Virtualization, can enable customers interested in moving to the new OS in a virtual environment a solution that is clientless and serverless.
Dan Cook, spokesperson for LANDesk, said his company’s product requires no extra infrastructure or overhead.
“We saw a convergence happening with customers and the channel in terms of system management and security management. Previously they were both in silos and now the responsibility of both are coming down to the desktop,” Cook said.
Application virtualization is a hot topic and a lot of channel resellers are looking for solutions in this area, Cook added.
LANDesk Application Virtualization is only US$39 per machine, but it’s a solution that requires a fair bit of professional services. Also the product has many robust features, which require staff training that VARs can provide, he said.
According to Coby Gurr, business line manager for the company, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, professional services is a four-to-one margin play over the product.
Once a customer is on-board there is also reoccurring maintenance revenue, Gurr added.
“Virtualization is a hot topic and we are ready to go for VARs. They can go out and sell this immediately and there is not a lot of configuration to this. This is an add-on type sale to anything else they do. You can walk in with a USB drive and do not have to touch the OS. It is an easy sell,” Gurr said.
Cook said that LANDesk’s key differentiator is that the package does not need any additional hardware agents. Hardware agents are loaded on computers and enables programs such as anti-virus to run.
What LANDesk Application Virtualization does is isolate the application from the OS and provide a layer called SANbox. “It literally plays in its own SANbox and now you do not have to insert by brute force with device drivers if you want to port Vista today,” Gurr said.
He added that a lot of LANDesk customers want to transition over to Vista but without an agent architecture or additional back end infrastructure.
The applications utilize an executable file and can be dragged and dropped without device drivers, Gurr said.
For example, Microsoft Office has more than 1,000 files with DLL or executable extensions and is about 500MBs. The LANDesk product compresses Office down to 300 MBs in a single file and is repackaged on a server in a streaming model or push down locally to the desktop.
“It will look like any other app,” Gurr said.
Gurr added that this is not a hosted solution, but an on premise one so that the customer will still have total control over its data and applications.
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