Last week, we were asked via Twitter to describe NxTop. Immediately, we thought: “No problem. We can talk about NxTop all day.” Of course, on Twitter, you don’t have all day. You have 140 characters. Here’s what we came up with:

Centralized 1-to-many mgmt of virtual desktops, local execution on bare metal client hypervisor, including laptops

That gives a nice overview of NxTop in just 115 characters. I think the one addition is that NxTop does what it does in a unique way. NxTop separates the main components of a PC: the hardware, the operating systems, user data and applications.

The limit on Twitter was useful to us. Since we can talk about NxTop in detail for as long as you’ll give us, it’s nice to be able to step back and provide a clear, concise overview. Twitter really is the new elevator pitch.

If you have a question for us, you can ask it here on the blog, via Twitter or on our forums. We’d be glad to answer it in 140 characters or less.

We are celebrating a major milestone at Virtual Computer this week, as we now have our first NxTop beta customer up and running.  We would like to thank Steve Dale for being the first to take the plunge. He’s the guy on the right who looks like he would think nothing of riding his Harley over to our office to “express his displeasure” if things aren’t working correctly. We have a debate going internally here about whether Mark from our engineering team (left) is really so soft that he needs to wear a winter hat and coat in an air conditioned data center, or if he was just prepared for a quick getaway if the install went south (thankfully, it didn’t).

All joking aside, one of the most rewarding things about working at Virtual Computer has been setting very aggressive goals for ourselves and then working as a team to deliver the impossible. When we first began work on NxTop, our goal of having a working end-to-end product that we could “wow” people with at VMworld in September followed by a beta in November seemed a bit outlandish. We are now two-for-two thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, the innovation and drive of our VP of Engineering, and a CTO with a big idea and an uncanny ability to knock down any technical obstacle in our way.

We have had overwhelming interest in the NxTop beta program, and we will continue to grow our base of beta implementations in the coming weeks and months.  If you have already expressed interested and haven’t heard from us yet, you will soon.  If you haven’t yet expressed interest and would like to, you can do so here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Not that we needed another reason to love Starbucks here at Virtual Computer, but they are quickly emerging as a poster child for why a better management and security approach is needed for laptop PCs—something we are a bit passionate about here.  After a lot of Internet buzz, leaked internal memos, etc. over the last couple of days, Starbucks has confirmed that a laptop containing personal data on nearly 100,000 employees has been stolen.  Not only that, but they are the first high profile “repeat offender” I have seen in a while.  They actually lost four laptops in late 2006 that also contained sensitive employee data.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more information on what is another unfortunate example of stolen data and hardware leading to expense and, frankly, embarrassment that could have been avoided.

Our recent post on laptop theft statistics goes into detail on not only how many laptops are stolen and how often (one every 53 seconds – think about that) but also how we are designing NxTop to help companies avoid this problem in the future.

Since announcing NxTop in September, we’ve been saying that our solution will change the face of PC management.  While there are a number of solutions for managing desktops, NxTop is unique in its ability to apply desktop virtualization to both stationary desktop PCs and laptop PCs to dramatically improve their manageability, reliability, and security.

We continue to talk with the press and IT community about NxTop, the technology behind NxTop and our mission to use the latest in virtualization technology (a type 1, bare metal client hypervisor) to make PC lifecycle management easier than ever, including for the laptop PCs that present so many headaches to IT professionals today.

One of our more recent discussions was with Enterprise Management Quarterly. Virtual Computer CEO Dan McCall provided his perspective on the challenges faced by IT staffs in managing laptops, how managing laptops differs from managing traditional desktops, security implications, the limitation of agents and more.

Here are a few quick excerpts:

IT Managers have begun to find that the same virtualization technologies that have revolutionized the way IT data centers are managed can improve the manageability, reliability and security of desktop operating system environments.  Right now, most desktop management is done using software agents within the operating system.  This approach has reached its limit in terms of both functionality and usability.

When time comes for an IT Manager to apply a patch to the desktop operating system, they need only apply the patch to the master virtual machine running on NxTop Center.  Once the patch is applied, NxTop Center seamlessly publishes the blocks of data that have changed to all NxTop Engines subscribed to that virtual machine.

Our most significant technology innovation is our patent pending approach for isolating the four main components of the PC: hardware, operating system, applications and user data.  Allowing each of these components to be managed independently is what enables us to give IT Managers scalable one-to-many desktop management without taking the “personal” out of personal computers the way that other desktop virtualization products have.

Read the full article at Enterprise Management Quarterly and if you have any questions on NxTop, Dan’s article or Virtual Computer, let us know in the comments below or on our forums.

Last week, we announced an addition to our Board of Directors: Rick Faulk, president and CEO of Mzinga.

Rick has been working in the high-tech industry for 21 years at Lotus, PictureTel, Intranets.com, his current role at Mzinga and more. We’re glad to have him working with us. His experience will ensure that NxTop is the right product delivered to the right people. Rick is excited about working with us and says:

“Virtual Computer has rapidly emerged as a leader and key innovator in PC management and they will put significant pressure on larger, more established companies to ‘catch up.’ I look forward to helping accelerate their efforts to penetrate this emerging technology segment.”

Rick Faulk, who we announced yesterday has joined our Board of Directors, sent us a pointer to a very interesting article in the November issue of Fast Company magazine.  It included some data points that I found a bit staggering:

• A laptop is stolen every 53 seconds.
• More than 12,000 laptops disappear each week from U.S. airports alone.
• Only 3% of laptops are ever returned.

The article went on to describe some of the technologies out there for tracking and recovering stolen laptops as they come up on a network somewhere “in the wild.”  This is innovate technology, and it seems like it is getting some very positive results.  However, in my view, it is only a partial solution.  With NxTop, we provide a similar ability to remotely “kill” a laptop and wipe away its data.  This throws up some pretty big obstacles to the run of the mill thief.  However, a criminal can counteract this through a variety of methods ranging in sophistication from simply not connecting the laptop to a network to pulling the hard drive out and accessing the data through other means.

For most companies, the monetary loss of the laptop itself is nearly meaningless.  The two bigger concerns are security of sensitive data and lost productivity of employees due to missing data and time spent without a functioning PC.  So, in addition to remote kill, we have layered additional measures such as:

• Trusted boot to protect against tampering with our virtualization layer.
• Encryption by default for all data on the laptop.
• Policy-based controls governing how often the laptop needs to “phone home.”  (For example, if the laptop does not check in at least every X days, it becomes inaccessible.)
• Transparent backup of user data to the central server.
• Hardware abstraction that presents a common set of “virtual hardware” to Windows regardless of the underlying PC hardware.

None of these things is a silver bullet by itself.  However, if a NxTop-enabled laptop is ever lost or stolen, the company has assurance that they have multiple measures working in concert to make it a non-event.  For example, even if someone was going to take a run at cracking encryption, the ticking clock of the “phone home” policy dramatically shortens the window they have to do so.  Additionally, the combination of hardware abstraction and user data backup allows IT to just pull a new PC off the shelf (even using an HP to replace a Lenovo or vice versa) and restore to a complete user-customized PC in minutes.

A government laptop containing personal information was stolen in North Carolina. The laptop contained personal information of people receiving services from the North Carolina Division of Aging and  Adult Services. Here’s the story.

While the data on the laptop was password protected, there is no guarantee that the personal information stored on the computer can’t be accessed. Now, there’s hassle and expense all around:

• North Carolina must contact all of the potentially affected people
• These people are asked to place a fraud alert on their credit report and to regularly monitor their credit report
• Additional people were notified to be alert (presumably, contact information was on this laptop but not social security numbers)
• The end user needs a new laptop and hopes their data is backed up (not just the consumer data but anything they’ve had on the laptop)

As you can see, this is a real problem for many people and, rightfully, there is real concern. In a situation like this, you hope it’s just the hardware that will be used by the laptop thief and not the data on it.

This scenario is one we are solving with NxTop. We realize that laptops will be stolen and that dealing with the follow-up in any situation is a pain. In most cases, it is the data on the stolen laptop that causes problems and not the hardware itself.

The solution we’ve come up with combines use of disk encryption and data leakage protection with the ability to remotely “kill” the PC from NxTop Center with a few mouse clicks.  Plus, all of the user’s data, applications, and settings are seamlessly backed up on the central server.  Simply register a new PC with NxTop Center—even a completely different laptop from a different vendor—and within minutes the user is restored to their personalized environment.  I don’t mean a base Windows image with collection of files from a backup server.  This is their desktop environment, right down to the settings and the wallpaper picture of their cat.

For more information, see this post: How Do You Deal With A Stolen Laptop? and this web page: Laptop Management and Mobile User Management

Stolen laptops are a real problem. Whichever statistics you choose to believe, the numbers are staggering and growing every year. Granted, this is no great surprise since laptop use is growing every year (side note: I haven’t seen anything but it would be interesting to compare the growth of laptop use with the growth of laptop theft).

With today’s solutions, a stolen laptop causes many problems and headaches:

• Confidential data may be lost
• User isn’t able to work until new hardware can be provisioned
• In a best case scenario, there is a recent backup of user data that can be restored to a new machine
• Employee wastes time re-customizing machine to their liking
• IT needs to build the laptop…best case, this involves an updated image
• Employee hunts down license keys for user-specific programs, wasting more time
• Depending on data on laptop, may need to communicate loss to customers which can be costly and embarrassing

What if there were a better way? What if you could simply “turn off” the laptop remotely?

This isn’t a problem with NxTop.

NxTop’s architecture separates the four main components that make up a PC: the hardware, operating systems, data and applications. This presents a very unique way of dealing with laptop theft: since all four components are separate, you can simply stop a piece of hardware (a stolen laptop) from accessing the other four components. Without that access, the stolen laptop is no longer a real problem.

As for the user, simply get them a new piece of hardware and provision a new NxTop to them. A few mouse clicks is all it takes to get them up and running on a new laptop, complete with their previous configuration (including any customization they’ve made), all of their user data and applications, and virtually no loss of productivity – and less of a headache for the IT administrator.

Sure, you still lose the hardware (assuming it isn’t recovered or found) but that’s much less of a loss than it could be otherwise.

Want to try NxTop for yourself? We’re still perfecting it but take a moment to register and we’ll let you know as soon as NxTop is available for download.

We’ve been following the trend of laptop and desktop shipments over the past year and knew that it was only a matter of time before laptops overtook desktops in number of units shipped and purchased.

This is, of course, part of the reason we’re focusing NxTop’s capabilities on laptops – when half of your potential customers are using a particular device, you better make sure you work on it.

Well, what we expected has happened: IDC has released a new study showing that laptop shipments overtook desktop shipments for the first time in Q3. From the IDC press release:

The third quarter of 2008 (3Q08) saw notebook shipments into the U.S. market surpass 50% share, topping quarterly desktop PC shipments for the first time in the history of the industry. The share of notebooks shipped in the U.S. in 3Q08 stood at a solid 55.2%, according to preliminary figures from IDC’s U.S. Quarterly PC Tracker.

The 55% ratio was made possible by a record volume of notebooks shipped in 3Q08 – over 9.5 million units – representing more than 18% growth both year over year and on a sequential basis, according to IDC’s preliminary data. These figures were reached amid a relatively active back-to-school season and the burgeoning financial crisis, which captured headlines but did not immediately affect the PC market’s performance.

The full article is available on IDC’s website.

Earlier this week, we showed a demo of NxTop to a group of IT administrators that we’ve been working closely with during development. We’re working with them as part of our customer focused development to ensure that NxTop is what IT administrators want, would use and would see cost and time saving benefits from. While we’ve worked with them for a few months now, this is the first time they’ve had a chance to see NxTop in action.

All of the feedback we’ve received has been very positive but there was still a bit of anxiety in showing NxTop for the first time and the anticipation of feedback. Our demo runs about 40 minutes and covers the creation, patching, updating and provisioning of a NxTop to an end-user, showing how activity on the management server can affect change on the client side in real-time (look…here’s a new operating system! now it’s gone! there it is again! now there’s a new application on the desktop!). We also took a bit of time to show how to set policies, customize a NxTop master image for a specific user, clone a NxTop and take some Q&A.

The demo was a great success for us and the feedback we received at the end was wonderful. It’s great to hear the validation that NxTop is something end users really need, are looking forward to using and that it will solve problems seen in current PC management solutions.

Of course this wasn’t the first time we showed a demo of NxTop. We were running non-stop demos at VMworld in September, some of which was captured on video:

- First Public Video of NxTop

- SearchServerVirtualization (under the ‘VMworld 2008: Exhibitors’ tab)

If you want to attend a live webinar to see the NxTop demo, let us know via our website. As soon as we have some dates lined up later this year, we’ll let you know when and how to sign up.