Endeavors Technologies believes it is one of the best-kept secrets in application virtualization and streaming. From its roots as a research project at University of CA Irvine more than ten years ago, the company has grown and developed three new versions of a commercial product, Application Jukebox, aimed at providing on-demand application delivery through a portable application virtualization and streaming architecture. Perhaps most interesting is Application Jukebox SaaS Edition, which extends the flexibility of on-demand virtualization and streaming beyond the enterprise to deliver applications to users when and where they need them. The applications of Application Jukebox are numerous, from enterprise IT application distribution and license enforcement and version control to consumer gaming through a web portal. Currently, 500,000 users are utilizing Application Jukebox (or one of its previous versions). If rumors regarding an upcoming pilot program from Microsoft that will allow service providers to stream Microsoft Office through a SaaS model prove true, Endeavors will be poised to make an even more significant impact on the SaaS market.
Company Strategy
– Today, offer three different versions of Application Jukebox to appeal to enterprise IT departments, individual developers, and consumer-focused ISVs.
– Deliver fully configurable virtualization by enabling administrators to choose between sandboxed and integrated virtualization, or any combination of the two.
– Partner with Service Providers and ISV’s to enable them to offer a variety of application virtualization and streaming options to their customers.
– Extend channel development in enterprise market through channel partnerships that define the benefits of Application Jukebox Enterprise Edition.
Implementation Strategy
Application Jukebox includes three primary components to enable application virtualization and streaming. The Application Jukebox Player is the client installed on end-user machines that creates the virtual environment for the application to execute in. The Application Jukebox Server is based on an Apache server, and provides the interface for the SaaS environment as well as the administration component to oversee license enforcement and a database to manage users and provide reporting capabilities. Application Jukebox Studio is used to create streamable and virtualized application sets from an original installer. As a SaaS implementation, Application Jukebox enables applications to be streamed to the user desktop with zero footprint – once the user is finished using the application, it is removed. This is a significant advantage of the solution from an implementation perspective because it doesn’t consume any bandwidth on the desktop and also provides protection from piracy as the application is never installed on the client. The server can be installed by following the install wizard and documentation. Installation typically takes several hours for someone who understands the prerequisites: Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS (optional for a SaaS Edition), Apache Tomcat/Java KRE and Active Directors (optional service for Enterprise Edition).
Critical Success Factors
– Successfully build out channel relationships to extend reach of Application Jukebox into target vertical markets.
– Educate market about advantages of application virtualization and streaming for the enterprise.
– Leverage recent market momentum of SaaS to extend reach to undeveloped channels.
– Communicate specific benefits of Application Jukebox in relation to competitors and illustrate how Application Jukebox is being used by each category of users (IT, service and content providers, consumer, etc.)
Upside Analysis
SaaS is an approach to enterprise software that is gaining steam across corporate IT departments. Its benefits are numerous – the ability to better control and manage application licenses, upgrades, and usage while delivering exactly the application services that users need, when they need them and where they need them. Endeavors Technologies has been working to bring the benefits of application virtualization and streaming in a SaaS model for quite some time, and Application Jukebox is the culmination of its decade-plus efforts. Among the benefits of Endeavors’ solution are its light footprint, standards-based foundation, portability, flexibility of applications, and rapid deployment. The fact that Application Jukebox enables the administrator to control whether an application is launched in a “sandbox” or integrated virtualization environment, or any combination of the two, is a key differentiator from the competition.
When Endeavors Technologies calls itself one of the “best-kept” secrets, it wasn’t far off the mark. Upside Research believes that the technology that Endeavors has developed has a wide range of applications, and the company is pursuing several of them currently. The consumer application of streaming games is an intriguing one and has been very successful to date. However, we believe that the enterprise capabilities of this technology are equally, if not more, valuable, and we encourage Endeavors Technologies to further develop these channels with specific enterprise-focused applications and success stories. The ability to optimally control application distribution, licensing, and updates will deliver significant benefits to overworked IT departments. The biggest challenge that Endeavors Technologies faces is having the bandwidth to develop all of the potential that Application Jukebox presents.
Download the Complete Endeavors Application Jukebox Product Brief.
