I thought it might be fun to start the new year by highlighting our most popular posts of the past year (well, the most popular posts since we started blogging in July):

5. When we emerged from stealth mode in September, there was a lot of interest in who we were and what we were doing. We posted brief bios of our management team and that post continues to be a very popular one: Meet the Virtual Computer Management Team

4. As we were wrapping up for some much needed time off during the Thanksgiving holiday, we posted about a milestone we were very excited about: First NxTop Beta is Live!

3. Our company launch made it to a popular virtualization blog and we decided to mention it: Virtual Computer Isolates Hardware, OS, Apps and User Data for More Secure Laptop and Desktop Management

2. The public launch of Virtual Computer just before VMworld generated a lot of attention: Virtual Computer Launches

1. Our most popular post of the year was one of our last posts of the year which showed NxTop running two operating systems and each operating system running a 3D graphics intensive program (Google Earth and Quake): 3D Graphics in Virtual Machines Running on a Bare Metal Client Hypervisor [Video]

You can view our full blog archives and keep reading in 2009. We will have more videos, more news of the NxTop launch, articles on technology and other posts talking about things we find interesting. If there’s something you want to see us post or cover, please let us know in the comments.

Happy New Year!

This holiday season, we wanted to give something back to the community, so we held our first annual Virtual Computer Food Drive and also provided a very nice assortment of gifts to a family in need.  Even though we still have a relatively small team, the generosity of our employees was overwhelming.  Our food collection box was overflowing the day after we launched the drive.  It was also very rewarding to support a deserving family - in our case a couple with foster children - and make their holidays a bit brighter.

I would like to recognize the two non-profit organizations we worked with, the Greater Boston Food Bank and The Home for Little Wanderers for the important work they do year round and for making it easy for companies like ours to get involved.  A special thanks also to Kyla Kenney from our team for stepping out of the day-to-day chaos around here long enough to make it all happen.

As our company grows, so too will our positive impact on the community.  We have a number of ambitious community outreach plans on the table for 2009, so stay tuned!

Yesterday, Virtual Computer was featured in an article in The Boston Globe highlighting “Bright Lights in a Dark Season.” The article zeroed in on the fact that Virtual Computer has been thriving despite the difficult macroeconomic climate, citing our continuing corporate growth and success while also highlighting the compelling personal story of one of our software engineers, Al Fatykhov:

But by 2001, the dotcom crash ended his assignment. His most recent job was outsourced this year, leaving him out of work Oct. 17. He joined Virtual on Oct. 20, and in November learned he had passed the exam to become an American citizen.

“In my career,” said Fatykhov, “I’ve been in startups a couple of times, and they didn’t turn out well. But when you look at the management and the market, you understand that this is a dynamic place.”

The Boston Globe came in to our offices a few times over the last couple of weeks, including during our gift swap (that’s Al checking out his gift in the photo accompanying the article), to talk with a few of us and also for a demo of NxTop (which you can see running a few 3D graphics intensive programs in this video).

We still have many mountains to climb in 2009 to get our product to general availability and find buyers in a difficult IT spending climate, but the fact of the matter is that NxTop is a great product that will save IT teams money – a great value proposition in a recession. There is more confidence and optimism around our corridors than there is gloom and doom, and I am glad that the word is spreading.

Our view from day one has been that by running virtual machines directly on traditional PC hardware rather than remotely on servers, we can deliver the manageability, reliability, and security benefits of desktop virtualization while providing a better end-user experience.  Graphics performance is quite literally the most visible aspect of the user experience, so it is a major area of focus for us.  We have great 2D graphics working in our beta deployments today, but we won’t be satisfied until we have 3D graphics performance that is not discernable from a native operating system installation.  We don’t want to “cheat” (and open up a big security hole) by allowing a graphics driver in Windows to bypass the hypervisor.  We want to do it all in virtualization.

Our fearless CTO, Alex Vasilevsky, not only came up with a great architecture for fully virtualized 3D graphics, he actually showed up one day with a working proof of concept.  A couple of us decided to put it to the test and run two separate 3D applications (Quake and Google Earth) in two separate virtual machines. As you can see, they are running simultaneously. With NxTop, you can switch between them in an instant while both operating systems are using 3D graphics. By the way, be careful when switching to Google Earth while playing Quake, as you generally get killed pretty quickly when you’re not paying attention to the game.

Check out the video:

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!

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.”

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.

This week, Burton Group is holding its Catalyst Europe conference in Prague. If you are planning to attend, be sure to check out Chris Wolf’s “Debating the Hypervisor’s Future” panel Tuesday afternoon. Our fearless leader Dan McCall will be joining other virtualization industry thought leaders, such as VMware CTO Steve Herrod and Citrix’s Ian Pratt, to debate the future of hypervisor technology.

It should be a spirited discussion that will likely cover a range of topics such as proprietary versus open source hypervisor approaches and the emergence of the client hypervisor. We are pleased to be have been invited to join the panel and proud of the fact that in less than two months we have gone from stealth company to a unique new voice on the global virtualization industry stage.

ChannelWeb posted their choice for 15 Hot Products From VMworld 2008 and Virtual Computer’s NxTop made the list (and we couldn’t be happier):

NxTop centrally manages both existing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for stationary virtual PC environments as well as virtual desktops built for mobile and remote workforces. It includes the NxTop Engine, a bare-metal PC virtualization platform, and NxTop Center, a management console to centrally management NxTop-enabled PCs. With NxTop Center, administrators can create a single master virtual desktop PC image and publish it to any of their users. The master image is maintained through a Web console which IT administrators can use to install additional applications, patches, or policy updates, and then publish just the changes to their users.

The folks at Virtual Strategy Magazine posted the first video I’ve seen of NxTop from the VMworld show floor (hosted by yours truly):

There’s a higher res version of the video available on the Virtual Strategy site.

Now that you’ve seen NxTop in action, let me know what you think. To see more of NxTop in action, sign up for updates from us and we’ll let you know when we are hosting our live demos via WebEx.