The new Workflow Manager feature will particularly help larger partners and those whose business revolves around remote app and remote desktop delivery. The company also discussed a new upcoming relationship with Google.

 

Today, at the Google Teamwork 2015 event in San Diego, desktop-as-a-service software platform provider IndependenceIT is unveiling a new version of its flagship Cloud Workplace Suite (CWS) offering, in which a new Workflow Manager feature has been added. It allows for the complete centralization of multi-data centre administration, so that large distributed deployments need no longer be configured manually.

“We always had a suite of applications running inside the data centre to do server templates and application customization,” said Chip Buck, IndependenceIT’s CTO and founder. “It was useful, but partners who had more than one physical or virtual data centre were required to transition from one virtual data centre to the next. Now we have completely overhauled it, so all that functionality is in the suite with just a point and a click. We decided to lift the veil and make it all point-and-click easy.”

Workflow Manager lets IT administrators orchestrate and provision everything necessary for automated, multi-platform, hypervisor/device agnostic workspaces, applications and desktops as a service. Partners can now execute rapid deployment across an unlimited number of virtual data centres through a single pane of glass, and without having to log into each as before. It’s a benefit that scales the more data centres are being managed.

“This is very exciting for our larger partners,” Buck said. “Partners interested in growing their business around remote app and remote desktop delivery will be able to move very nimbly between sources of virtual infrastructure. It’s the perfect timing for this kind of product.”

IndependenceIT has been growing their business at a breakneck pace against the incumbents in the workspace-as-a-service space.

“Citrix is the leader here, and VMware, and we are successfully competing against them,” said Seth Bostock, IndependenceIT’s CEO. “We had a 337 per cent booking increase last year and won many deals from Citrix. Citrix has a fantastic product, but a very different approach, in which the channel gets a puzzle box and gets to put it together. It’s time consuming and costly for them. It’s this easier management for the channel that is the key here, and which is helping our business.

“This is all about greater efficiency for partners,” Bostock added, noting that IndependenceIT recently took Citrix’s partner of the year in this space away from them.

Buck thinks that while Citrix has a similar product to Cloud Workplace Suite – theirs is called Workplace Cloud – IndependenceIT’s smaller size gives it an advantage here.

“I believe that Citrix is burdened with weight of being a company its size, in which they have millions of lines of code to think about, while we have a couple hundred thousand,” Buck said. “They can’t move with the agility we can to address the way the market is changing.”

Bostock said the announcement of Workflow Manager at the Google show represents a new relationship with Google that they expect will significantly expand their partner base.

“We are one of a handful of companies Google has asked out to their event,” he said. “Google is new for us. They are going into the Windows environment, and we expect rapid growth in the partner community as a result.”

“Our key partners understand that Google relationship is coming,” Buck said. “Partners are anxious to see how that relationship will evolve.”

Buck’s optimism there stems in part from being impressed with their discussions with Google to date.

“Their depth of probing about what we can do was deep,” he said. “Of all the providers we have worked with, they are the only one who asked us to test them, and determine how they performed compared to others.”