Liquidware Labs Launches Stratusphere™ 4.5

Liquidware Labs, the pioneer and leader in providing tools that automate and accelerate the assessment and migration of physical desktop to virtual desktops, has announced the latest release of their Stratusphere™ toolset (full text of the announcement is listed below). Stratusphere 4.5 includes the following significant enhancements:

1. Liquidware Labs acquired Entrique Systems, a vendor of Windows profile management technology back in August of 2009. The Entrique technology, ProfileUnity is now a part of the Stratusphere suite.
2. Liquidware Labs has added support for VMware View 4, Citrix XenDesktop 4, and Microsoft Windows® 7.
3. The management functionality in the suite, such as allowing for the ongoing management users’ desktops once they have been virtualized, have been significantly enhanced with operational and capacity management features.

This means that Liquidware has now started executing on the second phase of its assess-migrate-manage strategy for virtual desktops. The Profile Unity solution is used to extract registry-based Windows and application settings from a user’s profiles in their physically installed operating environment and apply them to a newer virtual environment. This is an excellent mechanism for porting the uniqueness of the user from their old physical environment to their new virtual environment.

Liquidware Labs made its mark by addressing a problem other vendors had completely overlooked; helping solution providers assess customers’ physical desktop environments to determine which desktops were good and bad candidates for virtualization. Stratusphere provides unique VDI fitness and user experience metrics to assist in this assessment. The addition of the ProfileUnity feature set allows Stratusphere to automate one of the most painful aspects of the physical to virtual migration – the process of ensuring that users do not lose their customizations – even if the migration includes a switch to newer versions of the OS and applications.

The most interesting aspect of this announcement (and the recent deal with Perot/Dell), is that Liquidware Labs is starting to position itself as one of the vendors that will contend for the business of managing the next generation desktop environment. It is clear that the migration to Windows 7, combined with the potential use of virtualization technologies to create a more flexible and manageable desktop environment is going to create a new opportunity for managing next generation desktops. While this business will be fought over by Citrix, Symantec, and VMware, there are also opportunities for focused and creative vendors like Liquidware. Since Liquidware will be participating in the early phases of these projects (the assessments and migrations), they have a natural entre’ into the business of managing the resulting virtual environments.

Here is the full announcement:

LIQUIDWARE LABS LAUNCHES STRATUSPHERE™ 4.5 – PROVIDING SUPPORT FOR VMWARE VIEW 4, CITRIX XENDESKTOP 4 AND WINDOWS 7

ALPHARETTA, GA, October 26th, 2009 – Liquidware Labs Inc. (LWL), the leader in User Experience Management for next generation desktops, today announced the availability of version 4.5 of its’ flagship product, Stratusphere, and the award of its’ fourth patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

LWL is seeing a huge upsurge in the deployments of virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and hosted virtual desktops (HVD) based on its award-winning assessment and service level assurance solution Stratusphere. The latest 4.5 version includes significant feature enhancements to enable businesses to thoroughly understand what they have, what they’re using, and what they need to move to VDI; including:

· Support for VMware View 4, Citrix XenDesktop 4, Microsoft Windows® 7

· Integration of ProfileUnity in the Stratusphere Hub – LWL’s profile management and user configuration solution

· New and powerful assessment and diagnostic dashboards

· Query driven analytic reports, trend analysis and capacity planning

· Correlation of user, desktop OS and VMware ESX Server performance metrics

· Plug-in to allow dynamic query from within Excel (or any other 3rd party tool that supports ODBC)

· Publicly available evaluation download

“Many of the largest, next generation VDI deployments include Stratusphere as part of the solution to drive the most optimal user experience and guarantee service level assurances. We continue to provide superior levels of granularity in our Stratusphere product to allow organizations to assess and diagnose both their physical and virtual desktop environments alike. Stratusphere allows you to “right-size” your infrastructure for VDI and next generation desktop designs – both from the user and application perspective – bringing cost-savings to organizations and serious productivity gains to users,” commented Jason E. Smith, vice president product marketing, LWL. “Combined with our latest patent, we continue to innovate in the VDI/HVD space.”

The latest patent awarded to LWL from the US Patent Office (number 7,591,001 issued September 15th) covers LWL’s innovation that embeds the health status of a Connector ID™ key enabled machine into each packet. This health status is established by comparing the existing configuration, usage or performance of the Connector ID enabled machines (either physical or virtual) to previously defined IT policies. Stratusphere can provide real-time audits of the health status of these machines using the network, along with controlling how machines connect to the network or to specific servers and applications based on their health status.

ABOUT LIQUIDWARE LABS INC.

Liquidware Labs™ (LWL) is the leader in User Experience Management for next generation desktops including VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, and Microsoft Windows 7. The company’s Stratusphere™ and ProfileUnity™ solutions have been described by analysts as the industry’s first “On-Ramp to VDI” by providing complete methodology and software that enable organizations to cost-effectively plan, migrate, and manage their next generation desktop infrastructure with best practices in mind. LWL’s comprehensive solutions provide Assessment, Personalization Management, User Configuration, and Service Level Assurance. LWL products are VMware and Citrix certified, and are available through a global network of certified partners. Visit www.liquidwarelabs.com for further information.