Sentillion vThere
I recently had a chat with David Fusari, Sentillion VP and CTO of Sentillion;; about Sentillion's product vThere. You'll note that I controlled myself and didn't title this post "vThere or Be Square" or something else on the silly side such as "I guess you had to vThere." It's clear that vThere is on the border between access virtualization and application virtualization. It is also clear that Sentillion has decided to focus solely and only on the needs of the health care industry even though their products could serve the needs of a much broader community.
Here's how Sentillion describes vThere
vThere enables healthcare organizations to overcome the remote access challenges associated with managing clinicians and staff that either work from home or in another location, such as medical transcriptionists, remote physicians, contractors or temporarily displaced employees.
vThere provides caregivers with a client-hosted virtualized clinical desktop that is identical to what they use inside the hospital. Caregivers can remotely access all of their clinical applications while maintaining patient privacy and data security exactly as if the caregiver were physically in the hospital.
By using vThere to provide accessible and consistent IT capabilities, healthcare organizations enhance their ability to attract and retain physicians and maximize the effectiveness of other caregivers and personnel.
How does it work?
vThere has three components including:- vThere Image Creator - a tool administrators or developers use to encapsulate applications into a "vThere Image"
- vThere.net - a web based image download and application management tool
- vThere Player - a runtime environment that supports the image and isolates it from the underlying platform, a so called "unmanaged workstation."
If I'm not mistaken, Sentillion uses SWsoft/Parallels' product "Parallels" as its virtual machine software foundation.
Snapshot analysis
Both the access virtualization and application virtualization markets are dynamic places right now. Big players are snapping up smaller players (see my recent post VMware acquires Thinstall) and newcomers are entering (see an example Qumranet Solid ICE).This means, of course, that players must work hard to come up with a way to distinguish what they're doing from everyonen else. Their presentations can't just be buzzword complient and succeed.
Sentillion has chosen the approach of targeting the needs of the health care industry and integrating access virtualization and application virtualization into a single, easy-to-use, easy-to-manage product. Although this means that they're walking away from opportunities that might come from other areas of the industry, it also means that they have developed a very targeted, easy-to-understand message that exactly addresses the needs of health care providers.
All in all, what they had to say was convincing. They clearly had industry experience and had addressed the needs of this industry segment. That being said, their product could serve a broader market if they so chose.
If your organization is in the need of a solution of this type, Sentellion ought to be on your list.