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!

Alex Vasilevsky and I had an enjoyable discussion yesterday with Dan Kusnetzky of the Kusnetzky Group, and he posted an update on our company this morning on his ZDNet “Virtually Speaking” blog. It is quickly becoming clear that Dan is one of the hardest working guys in the virtualization business. When we originally came out of stealth mode back in September, he made time for a briefing on Labor Day morning (sadly, we were all in the office making a final push towards VMworld), and clearly he is powering through the late December holiday lull as well.

Dan keyed in on an important aspect of our value proposition: the fact that we are building an end-to-end solution that includes both a feature-rich management system and a type 1 (“bare metal”) client hypervisor.  Doing both is hard, but we saw it as the only way to create real value for our customers.  While we are not a consumer technology (yet, anyways), we take our cue from MP3 players.  They existed before the iPod, but it was only when Apple brought together a great management tool (iTunes) that worked seamlessly with a great player (iPod) that downloadable music really took off.

Here is Dan’s take:

Unlike some competitors that focus on the hypervisor and just assume a management system exists that would help the IT administrators manage the encapsulated workloads, Virtual Computer started with the management system and then built a small hypervisor/client management tool.

This approach appears likely to result in a very well managed, optimal environment.

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:

Dan McCall, our CEO, contributed a guest post that appeared on David Marshall’s VMblog today.  In it, he explores some of the key questions that IT managers should consider when evaluating desktop virtualization approaches:

1. What are the real business drivers for desktop virtualization?
2. Do virtual desktops need to run on a server?
3. What about PC-hosted desktop solutions that already exist?
4. What will a mainstream desktop virtualization solution look like?
5. Will the end-users be happy with the solution?

Full post is here. It is an interesting read if you would like to understand more about what drives us here at Virtual Computer.

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.

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.

Chris Wolf from Burton Group did a nice wrap-up post on the virtualization panel at the Catalyst Europe conference that featured our CEO, Dan McCall.  We were pleased that virtual machine interoperability was a key topic of discussion.  This is an area that is near and dear to us.  Chris highlighted the fact that Citrix has taken steps on the server side to make virtual machines created on XenServer capable of running on Microsoft Hyper-V without conversion.

These types of initiatives are extremely positive in our view, as anything that makes life easier for corporations to deploy virtualization in multi-vendor environments is ultimately good for all of us.  Each virtualization vendor would love to “own” an account, and the customers themselves would likely prefer to standardize on a specific virtualization technology.  However, the reality is that vendor relationships evolve, companies acquire other companies, and IT environments ultimately end up looking a bit more complex than anyone would prefer.

At Virtual Computer, we have been focused on interoperability since day one.  We felt it was necessary to deliver a solution to the marketplace that would interoperate with major virtualization platforms natively without conversions.   We incorporated into our client-optimized bare metal hypervisor full, conversion-free interoperability with Microsoft virtualization technologies such as Hyper-V, Virtual Server, and Virtual PC.  We are also very pleased by the efforts going on in the DMTF and the virtualization industry to define a common interchange format – OVF – that would facilitate interoperability between various virtualization platforms.

Bottom line people should stop obsessing about choosing the “right” virtualization technology – interoperability between platforms removes the angst of the decision.  And at the end of the day virtualization technology is just that - a technology; and what kind of solution one delivers with that technology is what really matters the most.