Despite the economic downturn, 2009 was a year of epic acquisitions. Oracle bought Sun. Xerox bought ACS. EMC bought Data Domain. But after the papers are signed, the press conferences are held and the lawyers are paid, who is left to handle the massive integration of employees? IT.

Whether the acquisition is small or record-setting, the task of assimilating the PCs of the new employees to meet the acquiring company’s standards is critical. The faster this happens, the faster people become productive.

What if there was a way to centrally and easily install an IT-approved OS version and applications on the PCs of the company being acquired, including for remote and mobile employees, without causing them to lose their other applications, data and personalization?

Here’s the scenario:

Company A acquires company B. Company B has thousands of laptops with various versions of Windows XP, plus the usual glut of office apps , user-installed apps and data.  The desktop managers at Company A sigh, and wonder how many weekends they will spend bringing all those devices into compliance with their corporate standards. Then, they consider using Wanova.

With Wanova Mirage, the desktop managers can quickly and efficiently transfer the user data, applications and personalization over the WAN to the data center, where IT can augment the transferred data with a Base Image (BI), comprised of the approved OS and corporate applications. When the BI is combined with the endpoint data, we call this a Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD). A CVD is maintained for each user, but the BI may be the same across many users. This allows IT to patch or update a single BI, and automatically propagate changes to an entire set of CVDs.

IT can now begin ongoing synchronization, where the BI data is moved to the endpoint, (without removing user personalization) and any changes the user makes are efficiently and optimally transferred back to the datacenter.

Centralized management, single image updates that retain personalization, full data protection, fast troubleshooting and restores – optimized for remote and mobile users. That’s what we do at Wanova.