SageCreek Client Viewfinity Featured in Wall Street Journal

Monday, July 26, 2010 1:49PM

SageCreek client Viewfinity received coverage in today’s Wall Street Journal’s VentureWatch column, July 26, 2010 (link and text of complete article below):

Start-Ups Look To Disrupt Stodgy PC Management Space

By Scott Denne

Fearing what may lurk on the next Web site or in millions of free downloads, companies have always imposed strict limits on what employees can do on their computers. Now several start-ups are using new technologies to give employees more freedom, without sacrificing security.

“There hasn’t been much innovation in that space in a while, but the pain point is significant,” said Peter Bell, a general partner with Highland Capital Partners. “The cost issues and security issues are only becoming worse.”

Highland and many other firms are backing at least half a dozen start-ups that are taking on a big challenge – trying to upend the handful of vendors that have dominated PC management for decades. The start-ups are not only competing with each other but with incumbents such as Microsoft Corp., Altiris (now part of Symantec Corp.), LANDesk Software Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co.

The payoff, however, could be large – research firm Gartner estimates the PC management market will generate over $2 billion in annual sales this year.

Most of the incumbents sell products that manage corporate computers by putting an agent on each one of them that enables an IT department to blast out software updates, security configuration changes, and access restrictions on computers across the company. But this approach usually puts limitation on the employee, such as what Web sites they can visit and what software they can download, and is ineffective in managing people who work out of the office on their own laptops.

Though there’s nuances to each product, most of the small companies in this sector are either providing a subscription service with a lower price tag and ability to incorporate mobile workers in the platform, or selling virtual desktop technologies that enable customers to get a better handle on management by storing all their desktops inside the data center.

Here’s a sampling of start-ups and small companies trying to change this sector:

Fiberlink Communications Corp. is a 17-year old company that three years ago switched its business model from providing remote network connections to building a subscription-based service that enables companies to monitor remote laptops to ensure they’re in compliance with corporate policies. Investors include Edison Venture Fund, Goldman Sachs & Co. and Technology Crossover Ventures.

Moka5 Inc. was born out of Stanford’s computer science department. Its early goal was to bring desktop virtualization to the common man, but it proved too early for that. Now it sells its technology to companies who have a large mobile workforce that don’t want to carry a corporate and a personal laptop on business trips. Highland Capital Partners, Khosla Ventures and NGEN Partners are among its investors.

Neocleus Inc. is bringing the mantra “if you can’t beat them, join them” to the desktop virtualization market. Rather than building a PC management platform around its virtual desktops, like many other start-ups in the sector are doing, it plans to license its technology to the incumbents in the management sector so they can incorporate it into current offerings- and better fend off the threat from the other companies on this list. Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds are investors.

RingCube Technologies Inc. was one of the first companies selling desktops that could move from computer to computer, either over the web or stored in a USB device. RingCube is backed by Mohr Davidow Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

Unidesk Corp. doesn’t sell any virtualization technologies, as it believes that companies will buy desktop virtualization from multiple vendors, much in the same way they buy PCs today. They need someone to manage all those hosted desktops, and that’s the role Unidesk hopes to play. Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners are among the investors.

Viewfinity Inc. is selling a subscription service geared towards smaller companies that don’t have the means to buy and run a traditional PC management suite. Since the service runs over the Internet, it easily pulls mobile workers under its umbrella- something that’s difficult from the traditional on-premise vendors to accomplish. Investors include Giza Venture Capital, JK&B Capital and Longworth Venture Partners.

Virtual Computer Inc. is banking on security being a defining factor in the desktop virtualization market. The company has designed a method of separating different software components on a computer in a way that they never interact with each other, limiting the spread of malware across individual machines and the corporate network. Citrix Systems, Flybridge Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners have invested in Virtual Computer.

Wanova Inc. pares down an operating system to the base components so a company can implement its security and other settings on a single image, then share that image with everyone in the company, letting individual employees fill in the rest. That limits the number of desktops a company has to manage and reduces storage cost since all desktops share the same basic core that only has to be saved once, rather than once for each employee. Investors include Carmel Ventures, Greylock Partners and Opus Capital Partners.