First, a point of clarification: Quest is a global service provider based in Sacramento, Calif. The company is not to be confused with Quest Software, which develops IT systems management software and owns PacketTrap MSP.

Interest in cloud-hosted virtual desktops has grown as end-customers seek to access their PC desktops from tablets and smart phones. Desktone won its first big client of the year, Paladin Building Services, LLC, in early January 2012.

Quest, meanwhile, serves business customers ranging from SMBs to Fortune 500 corporations. The company has been continually building partnerships in order to meet an increasing demand from its customer base for desktop security, support, availability and performance on different types of end-user devices, including mobile devices. Quest partnered with NetApp back in August 2011 in order to offer virtual desktops in a scalable cloud environment.

But now Quest has called upon Desktone to help take virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) one step further. According to Quest CEO Tim Burke, the combination of NetApp and Desktone virtual desktop solutions will allow Quest to offer VDI support on smartphones, tablets, desktops and laptops.

“Service providers are looking for a complete Desktop-as-a-Service solution for their customers and are finding that shared desktop technologies and traditional VDI can’t provide the flexibility,” said Desktone CEO Peter McKay, in a prepared statement. McKay noted that other VDI solutions are built to be deployed on-premise and don’t provide the flexibility, performance and return-on-investment (ROI) that businesses need today.

Conversely, McKay says Desktone’s platform is a multi-tenant VDI approach for any mobile device.

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First, let’s take a look at the Novatrend win. Novatrend is leveraging AppLogic to run NovaCloud — a scalable, cloud-hosting service that lets customers design and deliver virtualized business services in hours, according to Novatrend CTO Michael Brunner.

“The CA AppLogic platform provides faster provisioning of applications, which allows us to more rapidly deliver services, while minimizing our go-to-market costs,” Brenner said in a prepared statement while outlining several different problems with other MSP cloud offerings, including limited performance and availability of dedicated servers in the cloud, and slow response times during peak hours.

NovaCloud customers can adjust their resources and cloud capacity to meet their specific needs, all through a single business portal. In the end, NovaCloud users will only have to pay for the cloud capacity they are using at that particular time. And if they need to scale up, they can pay for more capacity as needed.

This is becoming a familiar trend. Back in November 2011, ViaWest — one of the largest privately held data center provides in the U.S. – also standardized on AppLogic for its cloud strategy.

Back at CA Technologies, the company has been working overtime to gain mind share among MSPs and cloud services providers. CA Technologies Senior Director of sales Chris Goodman spoke with MSPmentor in October 2011 about some of the strategy. CA now sells multiple cloud services and managed services platforms for MSPs.

It sounds like CA is gaining momentum with MSPs and CSPs. But it’s also important to keep the momentum in perspective. As of late 2011, AppLogic’s installed base involved around 60 MSPs and cloud services providers — not a huge figure, but the number seems to be climbing steadily each month. And each win typically involves a pretty big name in the data center or managed services market.

Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.

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Paessler said the biggest improvement involves VMware vSphere 5 support because it addresses ESX 5, Virtual Center 5 and lets users see virtual machines (VMs) located inside of vApps. Plus, mobile browser support is enhanced. According to Paessler Founder and CEO Dirk Paessler, more and more of the company’s customers are already upgrading to vSphere 5 even before Paessler releases support for it.

“They [customers] want the ability to include these systems in their monitoring to ensure system operability,” Paessler said. “PRTG simply grows with their demands.”

On the mobile device side, the new version of PRTG supports the following mobile platforms:

• iOS 3.2
• Android 2.1/Honeycomb,
• BlackBerry 6
• Windows Phone 7
•  WebOS 1.4
• Meego
• Kindle 3
•  Firefox Mobile
• Opera Mobile 11

Over the next two weeks or so, we’ll be interested to hear the feedback PRTG gets from Cisco Live London attendees.

It seems like Paessler has been closely monitoring the mobile device usage trend of its customers and then responding accordingly. In December 2011, the company released its iPRTG 3.0 mobile network monitoring application for all iOS devices with editing, mapping and email capabilities, among other features.

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Users can plug SANsymphony-V into Hitachi’s IT Operations Analyzer. The Analyzer then requests all inventory data and updates from the storage hypervisor at regularly scheduled times. So when IT administrators are looking at their monitoring screens, the integrated solution is making sure that they’re looking at the most updated information.

There are two main benefits for IT teams to having the most updated data constantly available:

1. They always know about changes in resources.
2. They can take faster action to solving problems, since they don’t have to wait for the most updated information.

With the Hitachi integration, DataCore’s IT users will also be able to see a more comprehensive shot of their entire data center through a single window, and they can use that frame to better understand how their infrastructure is working. The single shot users will now see includes all virtualized storage resources, servers, applications and networks. If all goes according to DataCore’s plan, the added IT Operations Analyzer will help customers maintain availability and performance, and fix problems much faster than before.

DataCore’s integration move with Hitachi addresses growing virtual server and virtual desktop enterprise deployments. DataCore lets IT administrators monitor every device in their data centers on a single screen in order to identify points of failure and resolve the problems before they impact customer productivity.

DataCore’s partnership with Hitachi comes roughly four months after the company partnered with TwinStrata to develop a storage virtualization – cloud storage hybrid solution.

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VARs, MSPs and IT consultants currently using VaultLogix IV-Classic can now install one VMware agent on a VMware Vsphere virtual server and then backup and restore multiple virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously, all through that single agent. VaultLogix’s goal is help its customers save time by not requiring them to install on agent on each VM. The new support also gives IT service providers a choice: they can either restore entire VMs for disaster recovery, or they can choose to restore virtual disk files when they feel it is necessary to restore their data.

It’s no secret that virtual environments in data centers are becoming more and more common. And as business continue to deploy such environments, VaultLogix wants to make sure data in those environments are well protected, according to VaultLogix President and CEO Tim Hannibal.

In a prepared statement, Hannibal made VaultLogix’s goal very clear: “We strive to ensure that, no matter what combination of technologies a customer chooses to implement for their business, we can help them safeguard their critical data in an efficient and cost-effective way,” he said.

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“Companies want to understand their business data and better understand the operations of their business,” said McGibben, who pointed to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage as the event that brought a lot more attention to infrastructure monitoring. “In a case like the Amazon outage, even when it comes back up, if you don’t have an understanding of the interdependency of the applications within your infrastructure then you’re equally dead in the water.”

According to McGibben, LogicMonitor offers that necessary understanding through its monitoring software solution. True believers include IT Solutions and Bellwether Technology Corp., two managed service providers that began using LogicMonitor back in 2010. LogicMonitor has added others since then, like iVenture Solutions, an MSPmentor 100 company.

“We are really excited about the value we give MSPs,” McGibben said. “We let them give a higher level of support to their customers and we help them make more money than they did before using LogicMonitor. They can make money by going from reactive to proactive – don’t answer the phone when outage has occurred, find the problem and fix it first.”

Overall, LogicMonitor’s revenue has increased over the last year, though the company is privately held and does not release its sales figures. McGibben was brought aboard in June to help build on the company’s momentum at an international level. LogicMonitor currently offers its monitoring solution in North America and Europe, and McGibben plans to expand into Asia and further into Europe within the next two years. That expansion includes bringing aboard more MSP customers.

“This is an exciting and growing area that we’re getting into,” McGibben said. “We’re already seeing more demand for monitoring as a Service and we think managed monitoring service is going to be big for MSPs within the next year.”

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The lineup includes:

• Offline Streaming Support – Novell provides the fastest adaptive application streaming in the industry and now offers the ability for streaming applications to be executed without a persistent web connection.
• “Juke-Boxing” – Reducing the time and hassle associated with downloading multiple sub-products that aren’t being used in an enterprise, “Juke-Boxing” affords the ability to launch individual products from within a single application stream for suite applications.
• Application Control – Ensuring IT can maintain compliance with its license agreements, portable virtualized applications can now be configured to only execute for users who meet defined criteria, such as Microsoft Active Directory membership or if the device is being managed by ZENworks.

But the biggest difference between ZENworks Application Virtualization 9 and previous versions is that it allows IT service providers and corporate IT departments to harvest applications and then tap into a library of resources that they have created themselves over time. That, according to Novell, will help MSPs and IT staffs to save time when building virtual applications.

Version 9 also comes with a portfolio of  web-based, pre-tested, pre-built templates that MSPs can use to build virtual applications. In the end, the goal is to dramatically slash the manual labor typically needed to configure virtual apps. And since the templates are web-based, MSPs don’t need to upgrade their version of ZENworks Application Virtualization whenever they need to update an application.

The release of ZENworks Application Virtualization 9 comes just over six months after Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn reaffirmed Atacchmate’s committment to continue developing Novell’s legacy business, which includes GroupWise and ZENworks.

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MSPmentor: It sounds like you’re sticking with two company names. Will you eventually consolidate to one name?

Guice: We want to keep the GoBeyondIT brand to leverage more as the cloud services piece of the business and for the channel side. We are going to make a big push in the channel sales arena and we think this brand and name lends itself better than the outsourceIT name and brand. If we go in as outsourceIT some will view us as a threat and our think we are attempting to displace everything, when in fact that is not always the case, particularly now with our strength in cloud services and hosted desktop.

MSPmentor: Of the 70 employees, roughly how many were outsourceIT and how many from GoBeyondIT?

Guice: Technically all employees will ultimately merge over to outsourceIT as outsourceIT is the holding company for GoBeyondIT. But the split was 50 outsourceiT employees and 20 GoBeyondIT employees.

MSPmentor: How did you figure out a valuation for the deal?

Guice: We had an offer to be bought and we had a pretty good valuation from that company which we had in writing; we were able to use that as the basis for the valuations and it led us to good ownership format going forward. (Guice declined to discuss specific valuation information -Ed.)

MSPmentor: Your M&A announcement mentioned virtual desktop infrastructure — VDI — as a core focus going forward. How big is the opportunity and does it include the tablet trend?

Guice: VDI is huge and yes I see this technology being pushed to Tablets as well.  As a matter of fact GoBeyondIT has a partnership with a EMR company that bundles the hosted desktop solution with their EMR solution. These clients use tablets all throughout their networks, exam rooms, clinics, etc.

MSPmentor: How soon before you go looking for M&A targets on the U.S. West Coast for a national push?

Guice: I don’t know the answer to this just yet; we have two other M&A’s teed up but both are on the U.S. East Coast.  So for the time being we’ll probably stay put on this coast, but we will soon begin to market on a more national stage and then we’ll see if there is a demand for us out west, if so we’ll more than likely buy someone vs. open an organic office.

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“We’re looking at adding more policy management controls for customers,” Flint said. NEVEX currently supports Microsoft Windows operating systems running natively and in Microsoft Hyper-V. But according to Flint and NEVEX VP of Marketing Carol Mackay, that’s due to expand in 2012 as the company looks to support VMware ESX and Linux.

International growth also is on NEVEX’s radar. “The global market has been very aggressive,” Mackay said in comparison to North America. Mackay identified South Africa and Asia as regions with particularly high interest in NEVEX’s technologies, and Flint credits the company’s “major differentiator” for eliciting international interest.

“Our competitors implement caching at the block level or the hardware level,” Flint said. “It’s easier to implement but it lacks application awareness. We come from the data management side, and they come from the data storage side. We cache at the file level so that we can cache per application and also cache specific apps.” By caching applications at that file level, Flint claims that NEVEX’s solution can actually boost the performance of specific applications that cannot be affected by any other applications running on the same server.

So NEVEX plans to take its file level caching solution, which also integrates memory cache with flash cache, to the international stage in 2012 through its VAR program that it announced just three weeks ago. Interested companies can still apply to be a part of the NEVEX early adopter VAR program through the end of January 2012.

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“Windows 7 migration is huge  because companies that want to start supporting new users are realizing they’re cost model is out of whack for desktops,” Grant said. “They don’t want to purchase all that new hardware. That’s where VDI comes in.”

In theory, VDI solution providers like Desktone can pull all of the information stored on desktops and put it on servers to stream the information to users. That means all of the data is centrally managed and customers don’t have to worry about the cost of building servers and data centers and having storage and server experts on staff.

The difference between Desktone and other VDI providers, according to Grant, is that Desktone can deliver fully-functional Windows 7 or Linux virtual desktops from the cloud. “No one else has taken the approach to build a VDI solution for MSPs to offer this in the cloud,” Grant noted.

But other companies are also making progress in the DaaS/VDI space. Vyatta Inc. and Integral Networks announced in mid-August 2011 that they are trying to push DaaS into the cloud. Also, Virtual Computer claims its NxTop4 VDI solution can centrally manage data just like Desktone can. And RES Software recently launched the RES Service Provider program for partners with VDI solutions.

Desktone is aware that it needs several differentiating features because there are so many other players in the DaaS/VDI space. That’s where its security feature comes in. Desktone offers a multi-tenant architecture to essentially give each customer their own network. “Security is not a concern for them,” Grant said. “We are the only DaaS provider on the market to offer a multi-tenant structure.”

Desktone is currently offering its DaaS solution to three different types of partners throughout North America, Europe and Japan.

1. Managed Service Providers acting as they outsource IT team for SMBs
2. Cloud System Integrators (CSIs) serving large enterprises
3. Large telecommunication companies.

Look for the VDI/DaaS space to really heat up as consider their migration options to Windows 7.

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