Providing your users with virtualized desktop applications is getting to be a hot property. Two companies who dominate this space – VMware and Microsoft are being joined by a young upstart, InstallFree, to offer technologies that let applications be delivered to the desktop in a virtualized fashion.
InstallFree was founded three years ago by CEO Yori Gabay and CTO Netzer Shomai, both formerly with Gteko, a company that was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. The company launched two products, the InstallFree MiniBridge and the InstallFree Bridge last April. The company has received $8.5 million in funding from Ignition Partners and Trilogy Equity Partners.
InstallFree’s InstallFree Bridge software is a technology that doesn’t require agent software on each client’s desktop. It lets IT administrators deploy encapsulated applications to the desktop, which will function just as if they were installed on the computer themselves. InstallFree bridge is integrated with Active Directory or any LDAP application. When users log into Windows, a login script executes and downloads the user profile – called the Dynamic Desktop Elements – which contains applications the user is authenticated to, add-ons and updates. The Dynamic Desktop Elements are bound into the execution environment with the user’s personal settings and creating an InstallFree Virtual (IFV) application. The InstallFree bridge enforces and manages IFV applications and streams the application at the block-level to user desktops. InstallFree claims there is no performance penalty in streaming or delivery of applications to users.
The software is intended for users outside of the data center – it offers roaming profiles and is a true universal client, to which users can receive their applications through the WAN, LAN or USB device, independent of the host operating system.
With InstallFree Bridge, users can provision their own applications via a Windows-like interface. The company is also going to offer HTTP support for streaming. Streaming is bidirectional.
InstallFree Bridge also has an offline mode of application delivery, which lets applications be locally cached in the user’s application data folder.
InstallFree Bridge sells for $100 per user for a perpetual license.
In the near future, InstallFree will release a product called InstallFree Desktop, which will go into beta in the second quarter of this year, with anticipated availability in the third quarter. Like InstallFree Bridge, InstallFree Desktop will be priced by user.
