As loyal readers of Brian Madden’s blog, we have really enjoyed the new Brian Madden TV series that he and cohort Gabe Knuth started up back in February. It is clear that the acquisition of The Brian Madden Company by TechTarget hasn’t diluted the depth and independence that longtime readers appreciate and has in fact freed up more of Brian and Gabe’s time to focus on new types of independent content like Brian Madden TV.

We were quite excited that while Brian was in the Boston area for one of the TechTarget desktop virtualization roadshow events, he took time to visit our office to do a deeper dive on NxTop and shoot some footage for Brian Madden TV. The highlights appeared on this week’s episode of Brian Madden TV.

There is a lot of talk these days when it comes to NxTop, and Brian shot a ton of additional footage while he was here. So, keep an eye on his site for the extended version in the coming weeks for extra NxTop demo goodness.

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.