Gizmox - deploying Windows applications in a post PC world
Summary: Companies have developed and deployed thousands of applications designed for Windows. What do they do now that staff and customers are using Smartphones and Tablets and expect the same applications will be available. Gizmox thinks that it has the answer.
Navot Peled, CEO of Gizmox, to tell me about what the company has been doing since our last conversation. He was also proud to inform me that Citrix has invested in Gizmox and is beginning to use Gizmox technology in its access, application and processing virtualization solutions.
What is Gizmox doing?
Gizmox has addressed itself to the challenge companies face when trying to make Windows-based applications available to the ever raising tide of smart handheld devices staff are bringing to the office and customers are using to access company websites. Gizmox thought that if it would be possible to place Windows .NET applications into a virtual environment and then deliver the user interface as a stream of HTML5 commands, those applications would be available to any device sporting an HTML5 compliant Web Browser.
The company is offering a set of mobile development tools that address this need. It is even offering a tool that will automatically translate .NET-based applications without requiring a great deal of expertise or that the customer rewrite applications.
Snapshot analysis
The information technology group within most medium and large organizations holds the charter to make sure that IT-based solutions function in a reliable, safe, secure and highly available fashion. Unfortunately, since the budgets and staff of most IT organizations have been reduced, many IT executives believe this is a mandate to maintain the status quo.
This also means that these IT staff members see the use of Smartphones, Tablets and non-Windows laptops as an attack on that status quo. They have tried to stem the tide of these devices entering the company, but, typically they've failed. Why? Because some of the biggest users of this technology are senior executives.
The IT staff members don't believe that they have the skills or the tools to support these devices. Furthermore, they have developed or acquired a large portfolio of Windows applications that currently support the company's operations and don't have the time or money to rewrite them.
Gizmox is telling these IT people that the Windows applications can be easily modified to become Web- or Cloud-based applications that can work with just about any of these devices since most of them come with HTML5 compliant Web Browsers. Gizmox has even gone to the effort of developing a tool making the process nearly automatic.
While Gizmox's products don't address other issues related to these device, such as device configuration management, data backup, and security, they can be the foundation of a bring your own device (BYOD) strategy.
See Also
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
The only Hardware Vendor that thinks it is a Post-PC world is Apple
It isn't.
post pc
Post-PC - Not
Expensive
Marketing analysis fail
post -P.C. ?
ITS NOT POST PC IDIOT
"A personal computer (PC) is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator."
Therefor a Tablet or SmartPhone or UMPC is a PC,
If we lived in a PostPC world we would live in startrek land and even in start trek they still had PCs (IE Tablets)
post PC
I think a better term might be Mobile-PC...
High-level "PC" operating systems (eg Windows, OS X, *nix) provide much better integration and low-level support for their applications. Common OS features like Copy, Cut, and Paste on mobile devices should not be newsworthy, unless they are absent. Other popular features, like printing, sharing files between applications (aka "saving" and "opening"), and resizing application windows so you can see more than one application at a time, are all absent from the popular mobile operating systems; these are some of the things that continue to make a traditional PC superior to mobile computing, and they are some of the things that heavy mobile users desire.
In short, the "Post-PC" crowd does't care how they get traditional PC functionality on their mobile doodads, they just want it there.
Better terms...
Never mind arguing about the meaning of "PC"
Gizmox can downstream all the HTML they want to your cell phone or tablet, it still won't make if useful for serious work.