Why should you care about a product with just 14 customers? Perhaps because it promises to be the tip of the iceberg for desktop virt. Aside from the imaging platform, customers don't need to make any infrastructure investment. Really. Customers create images based on user type, host the images on vThere.net, then send users (either on-site or remote broadband folks) a download link via e-mail. Compare that with any terminal services solution.
Users pull the player and image down, auto install, and Sentillion's custom code passes a user's first login back to their enterprise AD authentication via Cisco VPN. Subsequent logins to the vThere guest VM tunnel directly back to the enterprise auth scheme. Compliance-types can use RSA/SecureID. A "locked" full-screen mode, admin-defined MAC addressing, and auto-updates to player and guest VM software were recently added to the mix to address customer requests. Bill Silvey ran a solid tech review of vThere last year, if you're interested.
Most vThere customers expect remote employees to use their PCs as host platforms. Configuration issues are minimized; as long as a user desktop meets the minimum spec for a client's image they're good to go. Compliance issues are minimized thanks to locked-down VMs, and no more pesky returned-equipment hassles to sort through when an employee is, um, right-sized. vThere guests can be set to self-destruct per admin criteria.
Sentillion switched hosting platforms to Parallels after it found VMware "just didn't play as well" as the development team had hoped. Citing a simplified user experience and cleaner installation, Fusari was effusive about his company's decision to go with Parallels.
Like the plain-vanilla Parallels Workstation, vThere will run on any flavor of Vista or XP SP2 or better. A Mac OS X solution is due this year. One caveat -- vThere will only work with XP SP2 guests running the Cisco 4.7 VPN client. What about those business-driven Vista clients? Fusari's answer: "Less than 1% of Sentillion customers run Vista, and there has been no Vista interest on vThere."
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