Pierre Marmignon (CTP) aka CitrixTools.net,VirtuAll Solutions and father of VUEM is giving us the pleasure of a quick interview at CTXBLOG.FR . Pierre gives us the headlines on what’s new with him, VirtuALL Solutions and the new VUEM version. Note that we had reviewed an earlier version of VUEM in a previous post : Test de VUEM 1.1.15 bêta – Post 1/2 and Test de VUEM 1.1.15 bêta – Post 2/2.
What is VUEM? VirtuAll User Environent Manager (VUEM) is a no non-sense workspace and performance management solution for all physical and virtual desktops as well as XenApp published applications
What are the main VUEM evolutions since its last version?
Big question 🙂 During your testing, you might have noticed that the solution have gained in functionalities and performance.
The new user interface is much sexier (goodbye the raw and ugly look of the initial version). It is intuitive and still manages to integrates all the new features
But the GUI side of things is only the tip of the iceberg: Internal architecture has evolved to provide ever more capabilities while maintaining one of the key success factors for us: performance!
The last version brings so many major changes that the tool is barely recognizable for the guys who used it previously: elimination of GPO, performance management, context awareness, Enterprise grade scalability, very very very fast, etc…
We unlock a ton of benefits:
- Around 10 seconds consistent login time on any type of desktop/workspace. Physical ones (good old and true Win 7, Win 8 and even XP locally installed) or virtual (XenApp published apps, published hosted desktop or VDI)
- A drastic reduction of the system administration effort thru a simple solution that even totally beginners admins can master in a few hours
- Almost instantaneous reaction time for your applications
- And… 20-25% more users per servers in XenApp, RDS or VDI
So you get the best possible user experience with a large and immediate cost reduction.
All that goodness for €28 per user and fully implemented in a few days. Can’ beat that.
What are the future evolutions for VUEM?
Profile management remains an issue in fat desktops environments. So we are going to bring a simple and pragmatic solution to our customer. And we will avoid the mistakes that plagued the solutions you could find so far on the market.
VUEM will also extend its self service capabilities to further strengthen the user experience and reduce support costs.
We are also bringing in line a server side capability, etc…
Dev teams are working on all these right now and as you can guess we have a bit of work ahead of us.
Which customers have already chose VUEM?
Large accounts to small and medium business bought VUEM: from 27,000 seats to 10 users… The 27,000 users are from Leroy Merlin (leading French retailer) with 20,000 hosted desktops and 7,000 fat Windows 7.
VUEM is running in production on tenth of sites. Present and older versions are delivering the goods daily, sometime since many years before the current release. This large initial adoption by the Citrix community definitely led the way to the current simple and Enterprise grade software.
Is VUEM still free and is it staying this way? What about your licensing modes?
We are keeping a free version but limited to the organizations that had difficulty to get equipped in the first place. And we will continue to actively contribute to the community. But this time with more resources than me-myself-and-I coding alone in my basement J
Now, it is also obvious that the current situation is different from the previous 10 years I spent writing tools for the community. Today we are a full blown software house and our objective is to grow and ensure the future of our company, team and solutions.
And we do that by selling software that are simple to use, highly performing and well-priced. Software that makes every infrastructures perform like world champions and reduce their TCO, without the need of top experts at your side.
Software that brings clear and immediate value to all our customers.
What will become Citrixtols.net? and the tools suite like XenApp cloning tools, session cleaner,…? While that remain free?
Yes all these remain free. Everybody loves them and I am very proud of that.
Do you have more projects coming up in the near future?
More super powerful infrastructure software, dead easy to implement and manage on a daily basis, at price points that makes them no-brainers for every type of organizations. And we are preparing something that is simply going to blow your minds toward the end of the year 🙂 .
One last word for the Community?
The Community is really great and gives backs enormously to all the guys like me who invest their time and energy into making things better.
We want to keep contributing!
We are all passionate and I would like to invite everyone to raise their fists with me and say NO to not-so-great environments! Say NO to infrastructures witch are not at the top of their game! Say NO to useless complexity!
Send us an email if you are stuck with a critical issue or if your user experience is not as good as it should be! Drop us a mail to discuss your next generation desktop projects! We can help you achieve spectacular results, easily, super-fast and for small budgets.
We are looking forward to see you all guys at Synergy Barcelona!
Thanks Pierre!
