With less than a week to go until VMworld, life has been pretty exciting around the Virtual Computer offices as we put the final polish on our latest NxTop product functionality demos.  Today, the excitement level reached a fever pitch, as we announced our new “Get Smart About Desktop Virtualization” program that will formally kick off at VMworld.  The “Get Smart” program will highlight how a PC management approach that leverages client-side virtualization provides significant cost-saving benefits versus both server-centric virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) models and traditional agent-based PC management approaches.  The best part is that when the dust settles, one lucky IT professional will walk away with a cool new car that is….well, smart!

The “Get Smart” program will feature a number of activities at VMworld where attendees can learn about NxTop’s unique PC life cycle configuration management capabilities, as well as interact with some of our key partners who help bring it all together.  The more you interact with us and our partners, the more chances you will have to win the car.  Keep reading the blog and come by and see us at Booth #1940 next week to get all of the details, including some “extra credit” opportunities for all of you star pupils out there.

Travel budget blues keeping you away from VMworld this year?  There are still plenty of opportunities to get involved.  In conjunction with the “Get Smart” program, we have launched a new online community site that includes a very nifty total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator.  The tool is highly configurable, so if you don’t like our cost assumptions, simply plug in your own.  Think our overall methodology is flawed?  Stop by the forums and say what’s on your mind.  While you are at it, sign up for one of our upcoming webinars on “The New Economics of PC Management,” which will provide another chance to see NxTop in action, along with an in-depth review of our TCO methodology.  Online forum contributions and webinar attendance will earn VMworld attendees additional chances to win the car and provide those playing along at home with a chance to win.

Stay tuned more more contest details as VMworld gets under way.  See you in San Francisco!

Silicon Valley is generally considered to be the center of the startup universe.  However, with its blue chip educational institutions, top notch venture capital scene, and rich computing technology heritage, Massachusetts has quietly played home to some of the most innovative and successful companies the average consumer has never heard of.

Fortunately, there are some great efforts afoot to raise awareness of all of the amazing innovation going on in the Boston area.  Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog (recently relocated to Boston.com) has become required reading for Boston area startups, and the folks over at Xconomy and Mass High Tech also do a fantastic job highlighting the innovative companies on the rise in Massachusetts.  Additionally, while we often catch flack for letting Facebook fly the coop from Harvard to Palo Alto, we have actually figured out how to use social media here on the east coast. 

Case in point is Mass Innovation Nights (MIN), an organization that has emerged as the confluence of Massachusetts high tech innovators, the social networking world, the mainstream media, and the marketplace.  The organization holds monthly events at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation in Waltham (You can’t find a more appropriate location than that!) where the hottest young companies is Massachusetts show off their latest innovations.

This month, MIN will be conducting its first “virtual” innovation night on Wednesday, August 12.  The event will kick-off at 6:30 p.m. on Twitter using the hashtag #MIN5.  (If you are new to Twitter, the MIN site has some good tips and tools for following hashtags.)  From there, the event will evolve into a phone-based “speed dating” style format with the help of some neat technology from past MIN participant BlitzTime.

One of the three rules for the virtual event is to play nice, but we are far too competitive for that at Virtual Computer.  So, we are putting out the challenge to the Boston startup community.  Do you think you have a more innovative product than us?  If so, the stage is set.  Let’s see what you’ve got!  We’ll be in on the virtual event, as well as jockeying for a spot in a future live Mass Innovation Night.  So, you better bring your biggest innovation, because we’ll be bringing NxTop.

Since our company’s inception, we have been singularly focused on making PCs more reliable, more manageable, and more secure through the application of client-side virtualization technology. As IT folks try NxTop, they tend to have the “ah-ha moment” pretty quickly about how deploying and managing virtual desktops on a one-to-many basis will reduce their PC managements costs and improve their security. However, in the current economic climate buying decisions need to be made based on fact and not gut feel. As a result, we have spent a significant amount of time analyzing the key contributors to PC total cost of ownership (TCO) and exploring how the NxTop model stacks up against both traditional PC life cycle management tools and newer approaches like server-hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

We look forward to opening up a more extensive public dialogue about our TCO findings in the coming weeks. As a first step, we are co-hosting a free webinar with IDC next week that will explore the TCO dynamics of desktop management in both traditional and virtualized PC environments. IDC analyst Michael Rose will review today’s desktop computing models and the TCO implications of each, and I’ll provide a brief demonstration of NxTop with a focus on the aspects of the product that have the biggest impact on TCO. I’ll also preview some of the early findings of our NxTop TCO analysis efforts.

The webinar will be held Tuesday, June 23, from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT. You can register to attend at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/284181498

I hope to see you on the webinar!

Update: We recorded this webinar and it can be viewed here: Realizing the TCO of PC Lifecycle Management through Client-Side Virtualization (registration required).

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.

It’s been a busy and exciting few weeks here at Virtual Computer as we worked to put the finishing touches on our NxTop 1.0 release. The blog has been an unfortunate casualty, so my apologies for the gap between posts. However, it was truly all hands on deck. We had our own flavor of March Madness where we set up a complete customer environment (wired/wireless networking environment, Active Directory domain controller, NxTop Center management server, desktops PCs, laptop PCs, etc.), and while our QA team executed a methodical testing program, a steady stream of developers, company executives, marketing and PR staff, board members, and anyone else we could scare up jumped in to help put the 1.0 product through its paces. As you can see from the photo, we even augmented our QA staff by having them bring in their children in on the weekends to help with testing. (Hopefully, we don’t have any child labor watchdogs reading the blog….)

In conjunction with our NxTop 1.0 release, we announced an exciting new program on Monday called NxTop Now!. As a step beyond the beta testing we have been doing since November, NxTop Now! is a controlled release of NxTop to our first paying customers, a very exciting milestone for our company. It is one thing for someone to agree to put your beta product in a lab, but it a quite another for them to get their checkbook out and put some skin in the game. It is really a credit to our engineering team for developing a product that dazzles everyone who sees it and a sales team that is highly adept at breaking through the noise in an increasingly confusing client virtualization space. This type of execution starts at the top, I would like to publically congratulate Peter Marconi, our VP of engineering, and Sandrijn Stead, our VP of sales for leading the charge on these two very important fronts.

This choice of the name NxTop Now! for our controlled release program is reflection of one of our biggest sources of pride. There are number of companies out there talking about client hypervisor use cases at this point. We are the first to deliver a true end-to-end PC management solution that makes use of a bare-metal client hypervisor. I honestly can’t remember the last time I used more than two or three PowerPoint slides during a customer or partner meeting. Rather than talking about use cases, we show use cases. The consistent feedback is that having something that is “here and now” clearly separates us from others who have jumped into the bare-metal client virtualization sandbox. I am sure that won’t always be the case, so now it’s up to use to keep the gas pedal down. On to release 1.1!

The NxTop beta program we kicked off in November is moving full speed ahead. (Note that unlike with recent posts, I resisted the urge to use either a train or spaceship analogy.) We recently entered Beta Phase 2, which included a software upgrade for our existing beta sites, as well installation of a bunch of new beta sites in the US and Europe.

Another important part of this process has been ramping up our own internal usage of NxTop.  We’ve had our hands on the product all day, every day for quite a while, but there is still a difference between that and “eating our own dogfood” for day-to-day PC usage.

Over the last month or two, we have been making a concerted effort to get as many internal users as possible on NxTop, and we have a reached pretty impressive critical mass of internal NxTop users.  This is not limited to engineers.  My entire product management and marketing team is cut over, and we actually made our sales folks install NxTop Engine themselves on their PCs.  I am thinking we may have a GEICO-esque marketing campaign on our hands: “So easy, even a salesperson can do it!”  (Sorry guys, I couldn’t resist.)

We have been working hard on this product for a while, and it’s a blast to be able to see it in action every day.  It is still a little rough around the edges in places, but it is amazing to see the progress between development releases.  We use Agile development at Virtual Computer, so as internal users or beta testers find bugs or make suggestions, they don’t just go into a black hole.  Fixes and improvements show up every couple of weeks.

I am running a mix of application staples, such as Microsoft Office and iTunes, installed directly into the NxTop virtual machine, as well as my own personal mix of virtualized applications (Skype, Firefox, etc.) layered on top of our shared corporate base virtual machine.  When the time comes to patch Windows, we just patch a single master virtual machine on NxTop Center, and each of our individual NxTop-enabled PCs is updated in the background while we are still using the earlier version.  On the next reboot, we’re fully patched.

If you would like to be added to our beta program waiting list, I encourage you to register on our web site.  You can also sign up to receive general product updates and availability information in the future.

Ever wonder what announcing a $15 million fundraising round in the middle of a recession would do for your web traffic?  It would probably look something like this:

The apex of the chart is Monday and Tuesday of last week, both of which shattered our previous record for daily unique visitors that dates back to our company launch from stealth mode last September.  While I hid the numbers, the baseline traffic we were getting previously was very respectable, so the announcement clearly made a big splash.

The bulk of the traffic to the site last week resulted from the great press coverage our announcement generated.  Kudos to Kyla Kenney, our PR guru, for doing a great job getting the word out to press and analysts, and a thank you to Andy Cohen and the Citrix team for assisting with our press activities.

We have become a bit addicted to watching the web stats go up, so I guess it’s up to us now to keep the excitement about Virtual Computer and NxTop growing.

Even though we have a well-ordered list of more pressing things to do, we couldn’t resist taking a little bit of time yesterday to pull down the newly released Windows 7 beta to give it a whirl on NxTop Engine, our bare metal client hypervisor.

It took a “hammer tap” or two from a couple of the smart guys we have roaming the halls here, but within a couple of hours of download we had it running on a bare metal laptop concurrently with XP and Vista virtual machines.  I will try to shoot some video later and post it.

Exercises like this, while admittedly of little short-term significance, really drive home why bare metal client virtualization will become the predominant method of executing end-user desktops.  I have seen a fair bit of commentary on whether enterprises running XP should move to Vista as a hardware/application compatibility stepping stone or skip Vista and wait for Windows 7.  With a product like NxTop, this becomes purely a business decision rather than a technology decision.  There are two key reasons for this:

Full Hardware Abstraction
By fully abstracting the hardware from the operating system, the process of certifying an operating system becomes orders of magnitude easier.  NxTop Engine houses the various physical hardware drivers in the virtualization layer, presenting a generic set of virtual hardware to the operating system regardless of underlying physical hardware.  The IT team will no longer need to worry about drivers, and Virtual Computer will do all of the work required to make our virtual hardware compatible with new operating systems like Windows 7 as they are released.

Point-and-Click Deployment of Multiple Operating Systems
Today, rolling out a new operating system is a major project for most IT organizations.  Very few IT teams are willing to flip a switch and move all users simultaneously to a new operating system–for good reason.  The potential pitfalls include hardware compatibility issues, incompatibility of key applications with the new operating system, and end-user training just to scratch the surface.  Even if all of the issues can be solved, there is also that minor issue of reimaging every PC in the organization.  Even with PC imaging tools, this would take more time than most IT teams can afford.

With NxTop, the IT team would simply create a new master virtual machine on NxTop Center and publish it to their users to run alongside the existing operating system.  At this stage, users can become acclimated with the new operating system but are still able to access their existing desktop environment.  After a reasonable transition period, the IT team can simply unassign the legacy operating system.  Or, if certain users require ongoing access to their legacy operating system for lagging incompatible applications, the two desktops can run concurrently to provide a longer-term application compatibility solution.

I am looking forward to playing around with Windows 7.  It took service pack 1 and maxing out my RAM to get me there, but I am actually starting to prefer Vista to XP.  I am interested to see if Windows 7 delivers further improvement.

Processor Magazine is asking how small and medium sized businesses are challenged by laptop management:

Notebooks are outselling desktops. IDC reported that, for the first time in the U.S., notebook PCs outsold desktop PCs for all Q3 2008. We knew this shift was coming, but what does it mean for IT? What are the new challenges facing IT managers, and how will they change their approach to PC management?

Making laptops easier to manage is a key area of focus for us at Virtual Computer, and Dan McCall, our CEO, provided some insight, including expanding on the challenges faced, such as patch management and backup strategy for laptops. Dan notes that SMEs, in particular, need turnkey solutions for provisioning, patching, security and backup.

The great thing about the NxTop model of centralized virtual desktop management with distributed execution on traditional PC hardware is that it provides countless scalability and mobility advantages for large enterprises while also scaling down very nicely to accommodate smaller organizations that find the server-hosted desktop model too costly and complex.

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!