– Anthony Keller, Territory Manager (SouthEast & MidAtlanic) at AppSense (www.appsense.com), says:
Virtualizing users is important in today’s enterprise. By virtualizing the user and treating it as a separate layer on top of the Operating System and the Application Layers, the user can now move seamlessly throughout an environment, across any delivery mechanism, and cross Operating System. Allowing for a way to centrally manage the entire environment from a single location, as well as enabling administrators to tailor policy based on the context of their users such as assessing device or location. In addition, we only roam the changes, or the deltas that a user makes as opposed to the entire user profile, so we significantly reduce the size of the profile and reduce storage costs.
AppSense Specializes in Policy & Personalization Management, which is essentially user virtualization. We extract all user settings from the desktop, the OS, and the applications, store it centrally in a SQL database and manage it independently from the desktop. From there we can apply the settings and policies on demand, as they are needed (at process start and stop as opposed to logon and logoff). This enables users to move cross OS and platform, and also helps in a number of different problem areas by reducing login times, eliminating profile bloat and corruption, and preventing the need to have many profile management solutions across the environment.
How can data center/IT managers benefit from this solution/product?
It will eliminate issues associated with solutions like roaming profiles, such as bloat, corruption, and slow logins. Gives admins much more granular control over policy, and enables them to dynamically change policy throughout a user’s session depending on how they are interacting with the applications and the os (Mapping printers or drives when an application is accessed, and un-mapping them when they exit it is one example). Policies can be much easier set and managed, and without an in-depth knowledge of Active Directory or without having to create separate OU’s.
We have over 12 years’ experience in the Server based computing and Virtualization space. We were one of the founding members of the Citrix Ready Program, and Citrix recommends our solution in any environment over 250 users. We have over 5000+ enterprise customers with install bases of 50,000-100,000 users and our software is being used by 18 of the top 20 banks in the world today. We won Solution of the Year at Citrix Synergy 2010, and the Gold Award at VMworld for the Best Desktop Virtualization Solution.
