Ceedo: Application Virtualization for the Desktop
Dror Gill, Chief Strategy Officer of Ceedo Technologies Ltd. and I played an exciting round of Email tag a few weeks ago. Ceedo presents its technology as "portable desktop virtualiztion." What does that mean? Well, my posts Just what is “desktop virtualization” anyway?, The Role Application Virtualization Plays in Desktop Virtualization, and Processing virtualization and desktop virtualization laid down the foundation for looking at Ceedo and its products.
Dror's messages came in at a time when my time was totally consumed by two large projects that are thankfully completed. So, rather than actually speak with one another, we just exchanged messages. Dror also sent along a presentation deck.
Ceedo has developed application virtualization technology for Windows environments and is focused on using that technology to create virtualized desktop environments. The technology intercepts calls to Windows that access the registry or the Windows filesystem. These calls are then redirected to the application virtualizaiton technology developed by Ceedo.
Ceedo's description of their technology
Ceedo’s unique virtualization technology creates a portable virtual desktop, which launches on any Windows™ host PC with no need to pre-install any software, drivers or agents. Ceedo’s technology takes a suite of standard off-the-shelf Windows® applications, without requiring any source modifications or an offline “packaging” process, and virtualizes them in real-time, creating a “workspace” where the applications can interact with each other. Ceedo’s portable virtual desktop runs on top of and leverages the exiting Windows® OS on the host PC, thus eliminating both the licensing costs and the footprint of a full virtualized OS, and works fully in user mode, enabling operation on locked-down PCs. Both the Ceedo virtualization core, and the applications that run on top of it, are fully managed, deployed and updated remotely.
Snapshot analysis
Ceedo faces stiff competition from some pretty large companies, such as Citrix XenDesktop and Client-side application streaming, Microsoft Softgrid, HP Consolidated Client Infrastructure and VMware's ACE and VDI solutions. It also faces competition from ClearCube's Sentry, Endeavors Technologies' Application Jukebox, LANDesk's Application Virtualization, Moka5's LivePC, RingCube's MojoPac and a few others. So, regardless of the strength of Ceedo's technology, the company is going to have to work hard to find ways to get the market's attention. The fact that the term "desktop virtualiztion" could mean a number of different approaches and different technology only adds to this challenge.The idea that Ceedo is implementing appears sound. I guess that's why others, such as Microsoft's SoftGrid, Moka5's LivePC are heading down the same technological path.
In my view, the key issue here is not whether the technology is workable. The fact that others have taken similar approaches and have thousands of customers actually using their technology demonstrates that it is a workable approach. The real challenges, like the challenges faced by so many small software companies, revolve around making IT decision-makers aware of the company and its products, getting them to consider the products and then getting them to select the products over the products being offered by all of the others.