The joint solution, available to IGEL OS customers now as a custom partition, delivers LogIn VSI’s ability to proactively test VDI application impact with a virtual user through IGEL’s lower-cost Linux-based devices.

SAN JOSE — Login VSI, which makes software that tests and monitors the performance and availability of virtual desktop environments, has launched a  brand-new partnership with software-defined endpoint management company IGEL. Their joint solution will deliver Login PI active monitoring, which is part of the Login VSI Enterprise Edition, through the IGEL OS. It was announced here on Wednesday at the IGEL Disrupt event.

“Our software emulates a synthetic human user, so that you can’t tell the difference between a virtual user and a human,” said Blair Parkhill, Login VSI’s Director of Products. “Our vendor customers use us to stress their VDI system and show how responsive it can be. Enterprise customers use us to test the impact of thousands of users simultaneously.” The company has two routes to market, selling direct to the vendor market and with a channel of end-user compute-savvy partners in the enterprise market. The channel in North America is fairly select. In Europe, the Go-to-Market is much more partner driven.

LogIn VSI’s technology is a scripted solution, which differentiates itself in the VDI monitoring marketplace by emulating the user perspective, to identify issues before real users would, and so head off complaints before they happen.

“Others will install an agent on a human user’s device to monitor application use, but no one else can take it into an application workflow as we do,” Parkhill said. “Our approach to it is unique.”

It’s a solution with a greatly increasing demand.

“We are really seeing a lot of uptick around Windows 10,” Parkhill indicated. “The twice-a-year patching has a big impact on large enterprises. They are pretty much captive to Windows, but using a virtual user to tune it as we do helps them deal with loss of performance, which has been in the 40 per cent range from the impact of Spectre and Meltdown. We are getting a lot of traction there.”

Parkhill views the new IGEL collaboration as creating an Internet of Things-type solution.

“I’m very into smart home automation, that kind of thing,” he said. “The IoT is about simplicity, and providing information that should give you an awareness of something. With that awareness, you can start to take action. We have built awareness to a remote site that provides that kind of information, rather than from a human user. The next step is to create actions from it, and automate actions. It’s the beginning of road of the IoT journey, with a parallel with how the IoT world operates.”

LogIn VSI partners with all the big players in the virtual desktop space, like VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft RDS, but Parkhill said that the IGEL partnership is rather different from the others.

This is different from our other partnerships and represents a different part of our strategy,” Parkhill said. “We are in different spectrums in the end user compute space. We are back end systems. They are a connection to the user experience. We have a unique and proprietary solution with our synthetic user, but we need a remote ability at the site to run this virtual user.  It is economic for us to do it with a Linux device and not have to license users, and IGEL provides us with this capability.”

The partnership grew out of a joint customer relationship.

“We have a mutual customer, a large financial firm, and putting together a solution for them was the synergy and start point for the partnership,” Parkhill said. “We just decided that now was the time, and the new architecture for our product allowed us to do this in about a month.”

LogIn VSI has strong expectations around this new relationship.

“IGEL is rapidly growing,” Parkhill stated. “While finance and health care are not our only areas of focus, they are our main ones. IGEL is entrenched in them and growing there. We have customers in those areas asking for better ease of use. This is where the partnership with IGEL really blossoms, with natural synergy. We already have a customer interested in this.”

The joint IGEL and Login VSI solution is currently available to IGEL OS customers as a custom partition. IGEL plans to integrate it into the IGEL OS firmware in a future release.