Unidesk Surpasses 100 Customer Mark as Enterprises Seek to Expand VDI Use Cases and Reduce the Cost of Desktop Operations

Marlborough, MA (PRWEB) August 10, 2011

Virtual desktop management software innovator Unidesk Corporation is experiencing rapid customer growth in a wide range of industries with the announcement that it has surpassed the 100 customer mark. The company topped this milestone only 12 months after the first release of its Unidesk® VDI provisioning and management platform.

Among the new customers implementing hosted virtual desktops based on Unidesk, VMware vSphere®, and VDI access solutions such as VMware View™, Citrix® XenDesktop®, and Pano Logic are engineering firm Winzler & Kelly of Santa Rosa, Calif., Amplify Federal Credit Union of Austin, Tex., Farmers Mutual Hail Insurance Company of Iowa, Thomco Insurance of Kennesaw, Ga., U.S. Indian Health Service at Fort Defiance Hospital of Fort Defiance, Ariz., Mt. Graham Regional Medical Center of Safford, Ariz., Boston University, the University of Connecticut, the City of Foster City, Calif., the City of Kent, Wash., Wyche Law of Greenville, S.C., German steel manufacturer Hoesch Schwerter Profile GmbH, and Glasgow Housing Association, one of the largest public housing providers in Europe.

These and other Unidesk customers in finance, insurance, healthcare, engineering, manufacturing, government and education have found that Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) -- previously limited to narrow task worker use cases where IT and user customizations have to be discarded after each use -- can now be expanded with Unidesk to satisfy knowledge workers and power users who require custom desktops. Unidesk persistent desktops sustain all IT and user-initiated changes, use up to 80% less storage, and can be provisioned, patched, updated, and repaired with unprecedented simplicity and speed. As a result, enterprises can migrate more users to VDI, reduce the cost per desktop, and realize greater operational cost savings.

According to IDC, the market for desktop virtualization is strong and is expected to exceed $1 billion by 2015. In its recently released “IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Desktop Virtualization 2011 Vendor Analysis,” IDC says, “Unidesk is on the verge of becoming a major player in the desktop virtualization market. The end results with Unidesk's solution are reduced storage requirements, the user customization needed to expand CVD (Centralized Virtual Desktop) use cases, and generally simplified management. Its strategy is well designed to promote healthy growth.”

Gartner agrees that the growth of hosted virtual desktops (HVD) hinges on the market’s ability to offer persistent desktops that are as easy and affordable to implement and manage as non-persistent desktops. “It’s not just about letting users install their own applications,” said Terry Cosgrove, Principal Research Analyst, Mobile and Client Computing, Gartner. “It’s about all the one-off, non-standard applications that IT installs for users that make non-persistent HVD unrealistic for most users. Solutions that permit application personalization and that sustain other types of desktop customizations are essential if HVD projects are to succeed.”

Unidesk’s patent-pending desktop layering technology uniquely satisfies this market need by combining massive OpEx reduction with the persistent personalization needed to satisfy a wider range of desktop use cases. With Unidesk layers, IT organizations can rapidly provision and patch all desktops from single layers of Microsoft Windows and common applications. The usual patch failures and resulting service escalations needed to resolve such failures don’t happen with Unidesk – even with desktops that are highly customized. Additional operational cost savings comes from being able to instantly repair custom desktops without escalations and minimal user downtime, and from simpler application packaging and delivery. Yet all desktop settings, user-installed applications, documents, and other changes are captured and sustained in the personalization layer associated with each desktop.

Jeremy Pollack, Director of IT at the UConn School of Business, says that before Unidesk, many enterprises found virtual desktops too complex and costly to implement, with projects typically stalling as attempts were made to offer persistent desktops that could be tailored to meet the needs of different users. “We see Unidesk as the platform that will enable us to have a mix of locked down virtual desktops for our academic needs, desktops running specialized applications, and persistent faculty/staff desktops, all of which can be affordable from a storage perspective and provisioned, patched, and managed centrally,” said Pollack. The UConn Schools of Business and Engineering and the UConn Libraries are implementing virtual desktops based on Unidesk, VMware View, and the Dell Desktop Virtualization Solution for rollout this Fall. A blog that chronicles their progress can be found at http://vpc.uconn.edu

“We are grateful to the IT teams and channel partners who invested in Unidesk to propel us past this key 100 customer milestone,” said Don Bulens, Unidesk CEO. “It is rewarding to see Unidesk customers succeed in deploying virtual desktops broadly across all use cases, while so many other VDI projects languish in stalled, limited deployments. Virtualizing more desktops, reducing the cost of storage and gaining operational cost savings are the keys to VDI market expansion. With our early customer success, we are proving that Unidesk is the management platform that makes this powerful combination possible.”

About Unidesk
Unidesk® Corporation (http://www.unidesk.com) enables customers to centralize more desktops on data center servers and realize the full potential of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Unidesk’s patent-pending desktop layering technology works with VDI access solutions such as VMware View™ and Citrix® XenDesktop® to sustain all desktop customizations for end users, while enabling IT to provision and patch all desktops from a single set of shared operating system and application images. By creating uniquely personal, storage-efficient, and easy-to-manage persistent desktops on VMware infrastructure that can satisfy almost any use case, Unidesk VDI management software reduces IT operations costs up to 80%, cuts data center storage costs up to 70%, and fosters a more productive, agile workforce. Unidesk Corp. is a privately-held company with headquarters in Marlborough, Mass, USA.

VMware, VMware View, and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. and Citrix and XenDesktop are registered trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Unidesk® is a registered trademark of Unidesk Corporation. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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