Application Jukebox chosen at Kingston University
Application Jukebox has been chosen as the preferred technology at Kingston University after a comprehensive proof of concept
When Kingston University approached Software2 about Application Jukebox they already had excellent knowledge about application virtualisation, because competitive technologies were already being used at the University and had been for a couple of years.
They could see how application virtualisation provided a flexible software deployment across University as well as evidence of reducing support costs.
The reason they were exploring other options was because the Engineering Faculty were coming up against issues with their existing solution. As well as their applications being very large in size many of them required the software to interact with local resources, such as drivers. As such, with their existing software, they were unable to package these applications to be delivered in a virtualised manner.
The faculty IT department could clearly see the benefits of Application Virtualisation technology but were simply unable to fully exploit these benefits within their department. Therefore they embarked on an in depth program to evaluate the available solutions on the market.
The main issue with their existing product was that applications were placed into a 'bubble' and run in an ‘isolated’ manner. Whilst this was of benefit for some applications the disadvantage was that it meant that a large number of applications simply couldn't be packaged, or sequenced.
Once the team started their research it was quickly apparent that virtually all available solutions suffered the same issue - in that applications ran in an ‘isolated’ manner. The result of this was that they were only able to virtualise up to 70% of applications.
After conducting initial research from over 15 vendors they narrowed it down to two products that behaved differently, and embarked on a comprehensive POC (proof of concept).
Application Jukebox from Endeavors Technologies, for which Software2 are the distributor, was eventually chosen as the preferred solution.
The main benefit was that applications behaved dynamically – as the user expects. Virtualised applications interact with locally installed applications with no interoperability issues (such as a virtualised application working with the local Java or .Net dependency). Many other solutions prevent interaction between virtualised and locally installed applications.
Application Jukebox is a third generation product and as such actually goes a step further than all the competition. The key benefit of Application Jukebox is ‘configurable virtualisation’, this is the combination of ‘isolated’ and ‘integrated’ virtualisation, and technology that is unique to the Endeavors product. This means that the administrator can decide which parts of the application are isolated and which parts are integrated - this is down to a file level.
This provides even greater flexibility and means that Application Jukebox can virtualise more applications than any other product on the market.