Endeavors Technologies just launched its Application Jukebox, an application virtualization and delivery product. It appears to me that this product takes the concepts of application encapsulation and application streaming to a new level.
Here's how Endeavors describes their technology
Endeavors Technologies, the pioneer in application streaming and virtualization technology, and its parent company, Tadpole Technology plc, today announced the immediate availability of Application Jukebox Enterprise Edition and Application Jukebox SaaS Edition. Application Jukebox is the next-generation application virtualization and streaming solution that provides a highly flexible and secure platform for on-demand application delivery.
The two versions of Application Jukebox available today include Endeavors' unique, fully-configurable virtualization that provides administrators with the flexibility to publish applications in fully isolated (sandboxed) mode, fully integrated mode, or any combination between the two options. Application Jukebox SaaS Edition features usage metering and a kiosk mode to support a pay-as-you-go model for application rental, plus portals that provide an easy-to-use environment for service providers and ISVs to create a custom application landing site. Application Jukebox Enterprise Edition supports Active Directory and offers user and group monitoring, as well as extensive tracking and support for cost-effective license management.
Snapshot Analysis
Endeavors appears to have thought about the concepts of application virtualization and applicaiton delivery/streaming pretty deeply while architecting this product family. The company has recognized both the strengths and the limitations of previous approaches to each of these concepts and tried offer products that offered strengths equal to the approaches offered by rivals while minimizing the limitations those rivals faced.
It is clear that isolating applications from one another is the best approach to address the needs of some applications and some organizations. Others would find that this approach would limit the usefulness of applications that need to be able to work with one another. For example, if Adobe's PhotoShop or MindJet's MindManager were totally isolated, they would be unable to receive content from Microsoft's Office or return that content to Office once they had done their work.
Application delivery/streaming is also an area of differing needs. Some organizations would state that they need streamed applications and their resultant data to be totally removed from a target client once the person had completed the task at hand. Others would wish that the application could remain for a time. Still others would wish that the application would remain but, there would also be a chargeback mechanism in place to that they could charge departments or individuals for the use of that application. Endeavors Application Jukebox can address all of those requirements.
For those of you who just can't help yourself and feel that you must read these posts every day, you'll recognize Endeavors and Application Jukebox because I've written about both in the past. In the post
Endeavors Technologies Launches Application Jukebox, I reviewed Endeavor's initial announcement of the Application Jukebox project. At that time, I thought the approach Endeavors was planning to take could result in very useful technology. Now that the product family has been released, I'm pretty sure that's going to be the case.
