This year has already kicked off with those speculating that we have moved to a “post-PC” era, the idea that the future of PCs is in jeopardy. While this viewpoint is shared by those vendors looking to move forward their positioning and lines of business, we feel that the call of a post-PC era is inaccurate at best, as it does not address the hundreds of millions of PCs and thousands of corporate Windows applications that are in use today, along with continuous improvement of the Windows line of operating system. Hence, the post-PC era discussion is short-sighted and leaves too many business professionals in the dark.

We believe the best solution to address the needs of both current and future businesses would be to define this era as “PC-plus.” Coined this way by IDC’s Bob O’Donnell, the PC-plus era highlights the operational scenario where Windows and non-Windows devices are co-existing. This delicate balance will remain as an ongoing opportunity for those enterprises looking to embrace all current and forthcoming devices.

One direction that VDI vendors are pushing for is to eliminate the need for Windows physical devices by serving Windows applications on hosted virtual desktops in the data center and letting the various devices remote into the hosted desktops using remote desktop protocols.

This scenario may work under some circumstances, but does not address the countless scenarios where the end user wants their device to act like their device, and not some 50% version that doesn’t leverage the device’s full resources and rich user-interface, cannot operate offline, and whose performance is affected by network latency for every operation they make.  Furthermore, the user experience of accessing Windows apps using tablets with touch interfaces is very limited and should be used scarcely.

We believe in an alternative model for the PC-plus era, which blends remote and local execution.  In this model, users will have the ability to use their non-Windows devices for native apps, as well as remote to Windows apps over a hosted virtual environment for occasional read-mostly purposes (e.g., when their Windows device is not with them), but will continue to use their laptops for generational day-to-day “read-write” activities – with a constant synchronization between the work spaces of the various devices.

We don’t see this type of scenario happening in the next few hours or days. The PC-plus era is a time for IT to find the best fit for their business that can address end user experience without compromise.

Most notably, laptop users, who outnumber fixed desktop users in most enterprises, require the ability to work offline. They also need a predictable response time for each mouse click or keyboard stroke they make, regardless of network bandwidth or latency.  However, when such users are away from their laptops for some reason (e.g., they lost their PC, or are traveling without it), access to their desktop using a thin-client protocol would be an ideal alternative.

So, how can we reconcile between thin and thick requirements ?

We propose that the future of desktop virtualization lies in “the flex desktop” where the logical desktop is untethered from its physical hardware. This desktop can be centralized and uniformly managed in the data center, but can also be dynamically mobilized, quickly, to the proper endpoint according to business requirements.

We’ve heard from many customers and prospects that this agility would, at minimum, create some valuable use cases, and from some who believe it could fundamentally change desktop management altogether. What do you think?

• Desktop administrators have no way to centrally manage images or ensure compliance with burgeoning regulations and policies
• Mobile users cause a constant headache to desktop administrators
• End users (especially knowledge workers and road warriors) hate thin-clients because they can’t work offline and the user-experience is poor
• End users (especially knowledge workers) want the freedom to install the applications they need to be productive (and have fun)
• Remote users with a laptop or desktop problem had to go through a painful diagnostic process, at the end of which their PC was re-imaged anyway

We engineered Wanova Mirage to address these — and many other — challenges faced by today’s distributed enterprises. And today, we reached a major milestone. We are shipping the first ever product in the market that truly bridges the gap between desktop centralization and end-user experience. Our novel architecture is a breakthrough solution to a long-standing customer pain, and it took 2 years of hard work to overcome the high technology barrier associated with this breakthrough.

I’d like to take a moment to reflect on what it’s taken to get to this point:

• Number of man hours to develop and QA Mirage: 120,000
• Number of years of experience in R&D: 453
• Number of cups of coffee consumed by R&D in the past 2 years: 35,700
• Average hours of sleep per engineer per night: 4

I offer my sincere congratulations to our exceptional development, QA and product management teams for their monumental achievement, and my gratitude to our beta customers for their invaluable feedback and insights. This is indeed a day to celebrate!

(and then, onward to V2.0 !)

We founded Wanova in April of 2008 to bring to market a technology that we genuinely believe is a game changing approach to managing, supporting and protecting desktops and laptops in large enterprises. We call it “Distributed Desktop Virtualization” or DDV. Our DDV architecture is unlike anything in the marketplace today. We created it to solve a number of issues that, until now, were limiting the ability of desktop virtualization to become truly ubiquitous.

We have a lot of additional information here on our web site that talks about what we are doing and how it works.

This blog will serve as a forum for two-way communication on everything from our products, to desktop enterprise computing and virtualization, to issues affecting any of us who are responsible for managing, maintaining and using desktops, laptops and netbooks.

Yes, that covers a lot of technological ground and lots of people. But once you experience our software, we think you’ll agree that we’re up to the task.

Welcome to Wanova.

We figure quite a few people are asking this question, so allow me to tell you a bit about the team that we’ve assembled to realize our vision.

On the executive side, Issy and I are entrepreneurs at heart. Our previous startup, Actona, was acquired by Cisco. At Actona, we realized the enormous business value that centralization can bring to enterprise IT, but only as long as end-users continue to enjoy the same user-experience. We also learned that bridging the gap between centralization and user-experience is not an easy task.

We’ve assembled a seasoned management team with many years of experience in driving new technologies to market, to execute our sales, marketing and product development efforts.

Our engineering team is based at our facility in Netanya, Israel, and has some of the best technologists in the world in areas such as networking, network optimization, Windows internals and large distributed software systems.

Yes, we have great individuals here at Wanova, but more importantly we have a strong team. We have a shared vision and passion to deliver a topnotch solution that surprises and delights desktop administrators AND end-users.