Virtualization Journal

AppSense announced full support for Citrix XenDesktop 4, a new Citrix product designed to make virtual desktops a mainstream reality for hundreds of millions of corporate employees for the first time ever.

“AppSense has been working closely with Citrix and our joint customers for many years and we commend Citrix on this bold and significant move. By combining two market-leading products and introducing FlexCast technology to accommodate every user type, Citrix has been instrumental in further reducing the barriers to mainstream virtual desktop adoption,” said Charles Sharland, Chairman and CEO, AppSense. “As the only enterprise solution recommended by Citrix to provide comprehensive desktop personalization for all users, we look forward to providing our Citrix customers a way to scale their virtual desktop estates at lowest cost and with maximum user adoption.”

AppSense, a Citrix partner of over 10 years with some 4000 joint customers around the world, provides technology solutions that enable low-cost, standard desktop images to be delivered to employees as fully personalized desktops. This ensures maximum user adoption from just a few corporate base images, reducing cost, complexity and risk. Their User Environment Management solution is the only technology to provide on-demand desktop personalization across all delivery methods and operating system versions.

Based on this unique level of customer experience, AppSense is well positioned to work in conjunction with Citrix FlexCast to provide centralized management of the user personality for task workers, knowledge workers and power users in both server and client-hosted desktop environments.

“We look at the desktop in a different way at AppSense,” stated Pete Rawlinson, VP WW Marketing at AppSense. “We effectively separate the desktop into three layers; corporate operating system, corporate applications and the user. By managing all aspects of the user independent of the desktop, IT are able to standardize the corporate operating system and applications, delivering them on-demand only when needed. The combination of Citrix XenDesktop 4 and AppSense User Environment Management enables companies to truly eliminate unnecessary desktop management costs while ensuring users of all types receive the very best working experience – even in the most heterogeneous environments.”

This layered model looks to be the way forward for mainstream virtual desktop adoption, as Rachel Chalmers of The 451 Group states:

“Separating out operating systems and applications and provisioning them dynamically means that desktops can be assembled per session and disposed of when the session is over. To make all of this work like a physical PC, though, administrators need to store stateful user settings and preferences elsewhere. Separating out this layer of user data is what we call user virtualization. Citrix ecosystem vendors pioneered the art of maintaining these user profiles in terminal services environments, and AppSense has led the way in adapting it to desktop virtualization.”