…But winning was even better!  It was an exciting week for Virtual Computer as we won two awards in two days:

At the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX) 6^th Annual Technology Awards this past Tuesday, Virtual Computer was awarded the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Promise Award in recognition of our efforts with NxTop.  If you are in the New England area, I encourage you to check out MITX.  It is a great confluence of people and organizations in the technology space focused on understanding “what’s next.”  We’re grateful to both MITX and PWC for the recognition.

On the following night, the Massachusetts Network Communications Council (MassNetComms, for short) held its 2009 Innovators Summit, bringing together some of the hottest companies in New England for a series of panels that quickly turned competitive as the format shifted to tightly time boxed product pitches.  Fortunately, the combination of a great product and the persuasive powers of our VP of Engineering, Peter Marconi, garnered Virtual Computer “Best Product Concept” honors. 

At the end of the day, our success is measured by what we deliver to customers and not by the size of our trophy case.  At the same time, it has been a grueling couple of months around the Virtual Computer offices putting the finishing touches on our latest product release, so it was great to see our team get some much deserved recognition.

Since our company’s inception, we have been singularly focused on making PCs more reliable, more manageable, and more secure through the application of client-side virtualization technology. As IT folks try NxTop, they tend to have the “ah-ha moment” pretty quickly about how deploying and managing virtual desktops on a one-to-many basis will reduce their PC managements costs and improve their security. However, in the current economic climate buying decisions need to be made based on fact and not gut feel. As a result, we have spent a significant amount of time analyzing the key contributors to PC total cost of ownership (TCO) and exploring how the NxTop model stacks up against both traditional PC life cycle management tools and newer approaches like server-hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

We look forward to opening up a more extensive public dialogue about our TCO findings in the coming weeks. As a first step, we are co-hosting a free webinar with IDC next week that will explore the TCO dynamics of desktop management in both traditional and virtualized PC environments. IDC analyst Michael Rose will review today’s desktop computing models and the TCO implications of each, and I’ll provide a brief demonstration of NxTop with a focus on the aspects of the product that have the biggest impact on TCO. I’ll also preview some of the early findings of our NxTop TCO analysis efforts.

The webinar will be held Tuesday, June 23, from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT. You can register to attend at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/284181498

I hope to see you on the webinar!

Update: We recorded this webinar and it can be viewed here: Realizing the TCO of PC Lifecycle Management through Client-Side Virtualization (registration required).

As loyal readers of Brian Madden’s blog, we have really enjoyed the new Brian Madden TV series that he and cohort Gabe Knuth started up back in February. It is clear that the acquisition of The Brian Madden Company by TechTarget hasn’t diluted the depth and independence that longtime readers appreciate and has in fact freed up more of Brian and Gabe’s time to focus on new types of independent content like Brian Madden TV.

We were quite excited that while Brian was in the Boston area for one of the TechTarget desktop virtualization roadshow events, he took time to visit our office to do a deeper dive on NxTop and shoot some footage for Brian Madden TV. The highlights appeared on this week’s episode of Brian Madden TV.

There is a lot of talk these days when it comes to NxTop, and Brian shot a ton of additional footage while he was here. So, keep an eye on his site for the extended version in the coming weeks for extra NxTop demo goodness.

It’s been a busy and exciting few weeks here at Virtual Computer as we worked to put the finishing touches on our NxTop 1.0 release. The blog has been an unfortunate casualty, so my apologies for the gap between posts. However, it was truly all hands on deck. We had our own flavor of March Madness where we set up a complete customer environment (wired/wireless networking environment, Active Directory domain controller, NxTop Center management server, desktops PCs, laptop PCs, etc.), and while our QA team executed a methodical testing program, a steady stream of developers, company executives, marketing and PR staff, board members, and anyone else we could scare up jumped in to help put the 1.0 product through its paces. As you can see from the photo, we even augmented our QA staff by having them bring in their children in on the weekends to help with testing. (Hopefully, we don’t have any child labor watchdogs reading the blog….)

In conjunction with our NxTop 1.0 release, we announced an exciting new program on Monday called NxTop Now!. As a step beyond the beta testing we have been doing since November, NxTop Now! is a controlled release of NxTop to our first paying customers, a very exciting milestone for our company. It is one thing for someone to agree to put your beta product in a lab, but it a quite another for them to get their checkbook out and put some skin in the game. It is really a credit to our engineering team for developing a product that dazzles everyone who sees it and a sales team that is highly adept at breaking through the noise in an increasingly confusing client virtualization space. This type of execution starts at the top, I would like to publically congratulate Peter Marconi, our VP of engineering, and Sandrijn Stead, our VP of sales for leading the charge on these two very important fronts.

This choice of the name NxTop Now! for our controlled release program is reflection of one of our biggest sources of pride. There are number of companies out there talking about client hypervisor use cases at this point. We are the first to deliver a true end-to-end PC management solution that makes use of a bare-metal client hypervisor. I honestly can’t remember the last time I used more than two or three PowerPoint slides during a customer or partner meeting. Rather than talking about use cases, we show use cases. The consistent feedback is that having something that is “here and now” clearly separates us from others who have jumped into the bare-metal client virtualization sandbox. I am sure that won’t always be the case, so now it’s up to use to keep the gas pedal down. On to release 1.1!

Greetings from sunny Cannes, where a team of us from Virtual Computer is in town for VMworld Europe 2009.  We weren’t really sure what the turnout would be given the state of the global economy and the corresponding pressure on IT travel budgets.  However, we were pleasantly surprised by a strong showing by both exhibitors and conference attendees.

The biggest news of the show so far has been VMware’s announcement with Intel to collaborate on bare metal client hypervisor technology.  It made a pretty good splash though many (myself included) are viewing it as a bit of a “me too” announcement given the Intel partnership that Citrix announced back in January in conjunction with their Project Independence initiative.  As a startup, the first instinct is to get a bit nervous when larger industry players begin to jump into your sandbox.  However, in our case it has provided tremendous validation of the technology model we have been focused on since 2007.  Both the Citrix and VMware client hypervisor announcements have generated tremendous inbound interest in Virtual Computer, since many recognize that we have a pretty significant lead in the race to deliver centralized PC desktop management using bare metal client hypervisor technology.

I was excited to be invited by Virtual Strategy Magazine to contribute some of my perspectives on the VMworld Europe festivities as part of their event coverage.  I have tried to keep these posts a bit more vendor-neutral than my posts here on the Virtual Computer blog, and hopefully they provide a good general flavor for what is going on at the show.  Visit Virtual Strategy’s VMworld Europe coverage center for reports from me and other contributors in attendance.

As I have described in the past, NxTop makes use of the Xen open source hypervisor to bring bare metal desktop virtualization to traditional PC hardware. Even though we have put a significant amount of our own work into implementing Xen as a bare metal client hypervisor, this effort would have been impossible were it not for the hard work and innovation of the global community of Xen open source contributors.

A couple of times a year, the leaders of the Xen project conduct an in-person event called Xen Summit. Xen Summit is an opportunity for Xen developers and researchers to share new concepts with the broader Xen community. The next event, Xen Summit North America 2009, is coming up in a couple of weeks. It will be hosted by Oracle at their Redwood City, CA headquarters on February 24 and 25.

While some of us will be at VMworld Europe that week taking our medicine from the VMware marketing and public relations machine, our co-founder and CTO, Alex Vasilevsky, will be keepin’ it real out at Xen Summit. Alex has been a long-time thought leader in the Xen community dating back well before his time at Virtual Computer, and he has been helping out with the upcoming Xen Summit as part of the committee that reviewed and approved proposed papers for the event. He’ll be introducing the authors of the various paper submissions and no doubt stirring up interesting conversation and debate throughout the event, so if you are going to be at Xen Summit please do introduce yourself to him. If you tell him you are a loyal reader of the Virtual Computer Blog, he will give you $100 from his own wallet. (Just kidding.)

Visit the Xen community site to learn more or register for the event.

When the topic of virtualization comes up, there are really only four companies that come to mind: Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, and Virtual Computer.  Right? 

The folks at SAP recently finalized the agenda for their upcoming SAP Virtualization Week 2009, scheduled for April 20 – 23 in Palo Alto, CA.  One of the highlights of the event will be a panel discussion that will feature our own Alex Vasilevsky along with Simon Crosby of Citrix, Mike Neil of Microsoft, and Steve Herrod of VMware.  I am guessing that it will be a lively and entertaining discussion.

The event agenda and registration details can be found on the SAP web site.  The SAP event timing and location lines up very well with the IDC Virtualization Forum West if you happen to be attending that event.  Travel budget in shreds on the floor?  SAP is also offering an option to view a webcast of the event via Citrix GoToWebinar.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out the report (PDF) that IDC’s Michael Rose did on Virtual Computer’s Series B funding and strategic relationship with Citrix Systems.  Michael is one of a small number of analysts who have been predicting the emergence of client hypervisor technology for quite some time, so when Alex and I showed up at the IDC offices last summer (complete with laser-printed stealth mode business cards in hand), I recall Michael saying something along the lines of, “It’s about time somebody actually did this.”  He didn’t just take our word for it though.  He quizzed us on the finer details of our product for a good two hours during that initial meeting and later followed it up with a visit to our office to see the NxTop in action for himself.

Here’s an excerpt of what Michael had to say in his recent brief:

Although Virtual Computer’s product strategy is based upon the use of a client-oriented version of the Xen hypervisor, it considers itself a desktop management vendor, not a virtualization company. Although this difference may seem like semantics, IDC believes it represents a main point of differentiation between the server and desktop virtualization market. IDC believes that compared to server virtualization, desktop virtualization will be far less disruptive, and that hypervisors will permeate desktop hardware far more quickly and extensively than servers, only a minority of which are virtualized according to our most recent data.

There is also a bit about the potential for a “XenSource-esque” acquisition in the future that gave us all chuckle.  We haven’t had nearly enough fun yet to start looking for the exit, but surely we are worth at least triple that price.  Server virtualization is the easy stuff!  

Download the full IDC report (PDF).

The NxTop beta program we kicked off in November is moving full speed ahead. (Note that unlike with recent posts, I resisted the urge to use either a train or spaceship analogy.) We recently entered Beta Phase 2, which included a software upgrade for our existing beta sites, as well installation of a bunch of new beta sites in the US and Europe.

Another important part of this process has been ramping up our own internal usage of NxTop.  We’ve had our hands on the product all day, every day for quite a while, but there is still a difference between that and “eating our own dogfood” for day-to-day PC usage.

Over the last month or two, we have been making a concerted effort to get as many internal users as possible on NxTop, and we have a reached pretty impressive critical mass of internal NxTop users.  This is not limited to engineers.  My entire product management and marketing team is cut over, and we actually made our sales folks install NxTop Engine themselves on their PCs.  I am thinking we may have a GEICO-esque marketing campaign on our hands: “So easy, even a salesperson can do it!”  (Sorry guys, I couldn’t resist.)

We have been working hard on this product for a while, and it’s a blast to be able to see it in action every day.  It is still a little rough around the edges in places, but it is amazing to see the progress between development releases.  We use Agile development at Virtual Computer, so as internal users or beta testers find bugs or make suggestions, they don’t just go into a black hole.  Fixes and improvements show up every couple of weeks.

I am running a mix of application staples, such as Microsoft Office and iTunes, installed directly into the NxTop virtual machine, as well as my own personal mix of virtualized applications (Skype, Firefox, etc.) layered on top of our shared corporate base virtual machine.  When the time comes to patch Windows, we just patch a single master virtual machine on NxTop Center, and each of our individual NxTop-enabled PCs is updated in the background while we are still using the earlier version.  On the next reboot, we’re fully patched.

If you would like to be added to our beta program waiting list, I encourage you to register on our web site.  You can also sign up to receive general product updates and availability information in the future.

Ever wonder what announcing a $15 million fundraising round in the middle of a recession would do for your web traffic?  It would probably look something like this:

The apex of the chart is Monday and Tuesday of last week, both of which shattered our previous record for daily unique visitors that dates back to our company launch from stealth mode last September.  While I hid the numbers, the baseline traffic we were getting previously was very respectable, so the announcement clearly made a big splash.

The bulk of the traffic to the site last week resulted from the great press coverage our announcement generated.  Kudos to Kyla Kenney, our PR guru, for doing a great job getting the word out to press and analysts, and a thank you to Andy Cohen and the Citrix team for assisting with our press activities.

We have become a bit addicted to watching the web stats go up, so I guess it’s up to us now to keep the excitement about Virtual Computer and NxTop growing.