Kidaro Presents Virtual Corporate “To-Go”
Ran Oelgiesser, VP of Product Markting for Kidaro, had a lengthy discussion about the company and it's recently announced product and I'd like to present what I learned. I'd like to also point out that this is the very first time a supplier's representative sent me an encrypted, password protected copy of their presentation deck. It made me wonder what the company thought I was going to do with the presentation. Here's how the company would describe itself:
Kidaro Managed WorkspaceTM leverages desktop virtualization to bring improved manageability, security and usability to enterprise desktops and to enable corporate-controlled mobility for remote users, without requiring servers.
Here's how the company would describe its products
Kidaro Managed WorkspaceTM is a centrally anaged and secured desktop environment that an be delivered to any endpoint, independent of he hardware or existing setup. Kidaro leverages standard virtual machines (e.g., VMware®, Microsoft®) to create a corporate-controlled workspace, fully compliant with corporate IT standards.
The workspace encapsulates all components of a standard corporate desktop -- IT operations can even leverage existing gold desktop images or group-specific images to build the workspace. IT administrators define a set of resources (e.g., applications, websites and folders) that are included in the workspace, and securely deliver them in one of three ways: via DVD, over the network, or for ultimate mobility, via a Kidaro ToGoTM desktop on a USB flash drive.
Once the workspace is delivered, end-users simply authenticate, and the predefined applications and resources become available on their desktop - no installation required, no servers needed.
Snapshot Analysis
As I listened to Ran present his company and his company's products, I kept thinking that this message was strikingly similar to that presented by LANdesk (see my post that conversation here) with a few of Catbird's capabilities (see my post on that conversation here). When I pointed this out, Ran said that the key differentiator was integration. In Kidaro's world, each of the managed virtual machine applications appear as a local application in a user's menus and taskbar. This would make the system easier to use and require less end user training.
While the presentation was interesting, I couldn't help but wonder how this small startup is going to get it messages out when there are so many companies presenting how they can use access virtualization to deliver an application to local or remote users. Some of Kidaro's competitors are presenting a thin client approach, some add blade PC computing to that thin client approach, others are offering presentation services so that applications can run on remote or local services and a very few are delivering virtual machines. In the end, the market is going to be confused and not be able to tell the difference.
Kidaro's approach is interesting and may offer benefits to those seeking very well managed access virtualization solution. It may take some time for a decision-maker to understand how Kidaro's approach differs from the competition, however.