451 Group Analyst Report: Liquidware Labs bolsters partnership with VMware
while forging new ones
Analysts: Karin Kelley & Rachel Chalmers
Industry observers – including The 451 Group – may consider the desktop virtualization market wide open, but profile management vendor Liquidware Labs is betting heavily on its relationship with VMware. The latest release of its user management product, ProfileUnity 4.7, comes with new purpose-built features for VMware's ThinApp. Two other significant developments for the two-year-old company are its recent partnership with desktops-as-a-service pioneer Desktone, and a licensing deal with Quest Software. The company claims 500% year-over-year growth in 2010 and profitability, but it started from a low base.
The 451 take
The integration of Liquidware's ProfileUnity with ThinApp is a logical follow-on to bundling the user profile management software with VMware View 4.5 earlier in 2010. Both Liquidware and the VMware Consulting Services group, which is officially supporting the product, hope and expect customers will see it as a way to approach upcoming Windows 7 migrations. The deal also plugs a significant hole in VMware's virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) story – one that the company first attempted to plug through its purchase of RTO Solutions in February 2010. While Liquidware and VMware keep getting closer, user-virtualization pioneer AppSense is drawing nearer to VMware rival Citrix Systems. Throw the Citrix/Microsoft relationship into the mix... (request full report below).
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451 Market Insight Service 28 January 2011
Copyright 2010-11 The 451 Group Page 1 of 2
Analysts: Karin Kelley & Rachel Chalmers
Industry observers – including The 451 Group – may consider the desktop virtualization market wide open, but profile management vendor Liquidware Labs is betting heavily on its relationship with VMware. The latest release of its user management product, ProfileUnity 4.7, comes with new purpose-built features for VMware's ThinApp. Two other significant developments for the two-year-old company are its recent partnership with desktops-as-a-service pioneer Desktone, and a licensing deal with Quest Software. The company claims 500% year-over-year growth in 2010 and profitability, but it started from a low base.
The 451 take
The integration of Liquidware's ProfileUnity with ThinApp is a logical follow-on to bundling the user profile management software with VMware View 4.5 earlier in 2010. Both Liquidware and the VMware Consulting Services group, which is officially supporting the product, hope and expect customers will see it as a way to approach upcoming Windows 7 migrations. The deal also plugs a significant hole in VMware's virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) story – one that the company first attempted to plug through its purchase of RTO Solutions in February 2010. While Liquidware and VMware keep getting closer, user-virtualization pioneer AppSense is drawing nearer to VMware rival Citrix Systems. Throw the Citrix/Microsoft relationship into the mix, as well as the challenge that Hyper-V brings to the table, and we see some hefty competition in Liquidware's future. That said, the barely two-year-old company has recently scored some impressive customers and inked promising agreements with Quest and Desktone. In addition, Rackspace now offers the Desktone Cloud service that serves virtual desktops for one dollar a day. Liquidware stands to penetrate the market through that deal, as well.
With the latest version of ProfileUnity, IT administrators can deploy and manage encapsulated ThinApp virtual applications on virtual and physical desktops. These applications can be streamed over the network while running in the datacenter, run and be cached locally for users working offline, or be killed and removed from the endpoint altogether. The usual settings define each user: name, business group, security and business policies, office and network location, and so on. Support for ThinApp bolsters Liquidware's already tight relationship with VMware, although the company's offerings also work with Citrix' XenDesktop and Windows 7. The company promises a feature that will let IT administrators design VDI environments based on optimal performance and usage metrics is on the way soon.
Liquidware Labs bolsters partnership with VMware
while forging new ones
28 January 2011 – Market Development
451 Market Insight Service 28 January 2011
Copyright 2010-11 The 451 Group Page 2 of 2
Through a recent partnership with desktops-as-a-service pioneer, Desktone, Liquidware's ProfileUnity will be available with the Desktone Platform. With the combined offering, IT administrators can configure the Desktone Platform to provision non-persistent, but personalized, virtual desktops to the users for whom it makes sense. ProfileUnity does this by parsing virtual desktops into three layers – applications, OS and user data – and then dynamically composing those when a workspace is requested. In another deal, Quest Software has licensed code from Liquidware's VDI assessment and monitoring product, Stratusphere. The result, dubbed Quest VDI Assessment, comes free with the company's vWorkspace platform. OEM agreements with Cisco and EMC and are also in the works.
The Alpharetta, Georgia-based company was founded in early 2009 by J. Tyler Rohrer, founding partner of VDI services firm Foedus (sold to VMware in 2008), and David Bieneman, who sold Vizioncore to Quest Software in 2007. In 2009, the company made two acquisitions of its own, picking up desktop virtualization management company vmSight and user virtualization vendor Entrigue Systems. The company claims to be profitable, has been privately funded by management since inception and is not looking for outside funding. Liquidware has about 30 employees and is actively hiring.
Competition
The ProfileUnity offering plays against user-virtualization vendors like Appsense and RES Software, since it can manage user profiles well after the initial deployment. VMware acquired user-virtualization pioneer RTO Software in February 2010 but didn't include the technology in View 4.5. The move helped pave the way for the partnership that Liquidware now enjoys with the virtualization mammoth. Quest, MokaFive and Virtual Computer all have user profile management pieces, too. Citrix, a Liquidware technology partner, offers both endpoint monitoring and user profile management software with its EdgeSight and User Profile Manager products, respectively. Workspace decomposition vendors Viewfinity, Wanova, Atlantis Computing and Unidesk have components that manage user profiles and Windows 7 migrations.
In the endpoint monitoring space, Liquidware Labs may run into Akorri Networks, which was recently picked up by storage giant NetApp. At the application-performance level, the company could see BlueStripe Software, eG Innovations, Quest's vFoglight offering, Netuitive, Nimsoft and New Relic with its SaaS product, RPM. Lanamark and Lakeside Software both have desktop virtualization assessment and monitoring tools, and AppDNA's AppTitude platform checks application compatibility pre-migration.
Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; copyright 2010-11. This report was originally published within The 451 Group’s Market Insight Service.
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