App-V partners bring solutions to customers at MMS 2009!

Hello from the Las Vegas where another Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) is underway after two great keynote sessions! This is a second year at The Venetian in the heart of Vegas and our 3rd year with App-V under the MDOP product suite. Sean’s back at it and working hard to help partners extend App-V and bring new innovative solutions to market.

At TechEd EMEA in November of last year we announced partnerships with various ISVs in the industry. Over the past year we’ve been working with partners who have developed some great solutions around App-V all with a common thread of speeding up deployments of one of Microsoft’s fastest selling products. Take a look and see how these partners can help solve your business challenges.

  • Acresso Software, makers of AdminStudio and InstallShield, are showing the GA version of the AdminStudio support for speeding App-V implementations. Announced in Nov at TechEd EMEA, the beta feedback for this new support of converting existing MSI’s to the SFT format is continuing with a lot of buzz coming into this event. One beta tester was able to convert 238 applications to the SFT format in under 2 hours! Needless to say this is a great help in moving more quickly to App-V. Acresso is showing the speedy process in a partner technical showcase Wednesday morning, Efficiently Managing Your Desktop Strategy for Application Virtualization.

Acresso delivered a standing room only session at MMS today and customers were buzzing about the new App-V integration on the showroom floor all day.

Check out https://www.acresso.com for more information about Adminstudio or to download the trial version on their latest release!

  • App-DNA, creators of AppTitude has been introduced to a number of App-V projects over the past year including one of the largest App-V deployments in Europe. With their ability to provide insight into potential issues across an entire collection of applications means that projects can, initially, be more accurately planned and estimated reducing the risk of. In addition to planning and remediation reporting, AppTitude can be used to provide the sequencing platform either as a command-line driven or GUI based activity where install and sequencing steps are automatically documented with screenshots providing recipes and valuable information for any future updates. Knowing when an application has incompatible components or is inherently unsuited to application virtualization saves significant amounts of time. App-DNA even has future plans to focus on a number of upcoming development initiatives on App-V analysis, importing and extended reporting to further improve the efficiency of App-V adoption.

Check out www.app-dna.com for additional information on how this product can help you review you application portfolio and determine which applications are candidates for virtualization.

  • Blue Coat Systems, a technology leader in Application Delivery Networking, has joined the Microsoft System Center Alliance to enhance and support Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 and Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) over the Wide Area Network (WAN) to branch offices for remote workers. Blue Coat will participate and exhibit at Microsoft Management Summit 2009 from April 27-May 1, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Blue Coat ProxySG appliances can optimize and accelerate the delivery of on-demand Microsoft App-V applications for remote users situated across WAN links.

In Blue Coat performance tests, Microsoft Office Word 2007 delivered through App-V benefited from a 70 percent improvement in the amount of time to load the application remotely and a 98 percent reduction in WAN bandwidth consumption. Most importantly, ProxySG provides optimization for App-V using application level optimization via its HTTP and RTSP proxies, delivering almost 2x performance compared to competition.

Blue Coat will deliver a session at MMS on Thursday April 30 at 11:45 AM PDT.  For more information please visit https://www.bluecoat.com

  • Certeon just announced at MMS their support for Microsoft APP-V and SCCM 2007 R2 with their aCelera product. aCelera is a virtual appliance (running on Hyper-V, managed through SCVMM) that accelerates application deployment, access and management throughout a distributed enterprise. Since aCelera is a virtual appliance, the time to bring an APP-V infrastructure live is drastically reduced. In testing conducted by Certeon aCelera Virtual Appliances reduced APP-V and SCCM application deployment times over the WAN by more than 95% without the need for proprietary hardware appliances. It also helps the APP-V update process by only sending the delta differences for virtual application file versions between servers. For example, if Microsoft Office was packaged originally with an 800 MB SFT file and was later updated with a 1 MB patch then instead of transferring 801 MB to the branch it is now reduced to just the 1 MB transfer with Certeon aCelera! aCelera software also accelerates business applications such as Microsoft Office, SharePoint/MOSS, and Exchange through the same infrastructure.

For more information please visit https://www.certeon.com

  • FullArmor is a bit unique this year at MMS since they are announcing the availability of two separate products that integrate with Microsoft System Center.
    •  FullArmor AppPortal is a software + services offering built on top of Windows Azure that provides scalable App-V virtual application deployment and management. The App-V virtual applications are run in standalone mode requiring only the App-V client, which makes it ideal for the SMB and consumer markets. Through AppPortal for Windows Azure, App-V virtual applications can be pushed to the endpoints silently by the administrator. Also, a white list of applications can also be published by the administrator to be downloaded and used on a self-service basis. Detailed software inventory and tracking simplifies subscription license management. AppPortal for Window Azure is an ideal solution to enable App-V virtual application deployment and management without any upfront costs in servers or datacenters.
    • ProvisionPortal integrates with System Center VMM and Operations Manager as well as Citrix Workflow Studio to automate the orchestration and provisioning of virtual and physical resources across clouds. By integrating key automation tools together with ProvisionPortal, customers can implement their solutions to take advantage of the elastic nature of cloud computing to automatically provision exactly the right amount of resources for a given load. ProvisionPortal enables customers to blend on-premise and off-premise clouds to optimize utilization of resources and better manage costs.

For more information please visit https://www.fullarmor.com  

  • Quest Software recently announced Quest vWorkspace which integrates with Microsoft App-V by importing App-V servers and their sequenced applications, bringing the App-V resources within the vWorkspace desktop and application management infrastructure. This consolidated management infrastructure enhances deployments of the App-V applications across load-balanced terminal servers, Hyper-V virtualized Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7 virtual desktops, and physical or blade pc workstations. This empowers enterprise IT managers to seamlessly match virtualized application CPU and memory resource needs to the underlying IT physical resources. vWorkspace further extends delivery of App-V virtual application to remote connected users, at any time, from either a remote desktop session or as a seamless windowed remote virtual application. vWorkspace integrates the deployment and delivery of App-V allocations in the same way as installed applications, providing end-users a consistent desktop experience. vWorkspace integrates App-V applications with the Quest End-User Optimized Protocol enhancements to RDP to take advantage of remote session graphics and flash acceleration, latency reduction local text echo, microphone redirection, multimedia acceleration, as well as usb device redirection so that the App-V application experience is optimized to meet the end-user needs.

For more information please visit https://www.quest.com

Sean and I want to extend hardy congratulations to all of the System Center Alliance partners for their accomplishments in the past year and we look forward to what our partners can bring to market in the coming months.  If you’re an ISV interested in integration with App-V please contact Sean.