Despite its current size Liquidware Labs, the new company of David Bieneman, founder and former CEO of Vizioncore (acquired by Quest in January 2008), is demonstrating to be extremely aggressive.
The startup acquired VMSight in May, just before its public launch, and then opened a community portal at VDI.com (which is a notable investment considering the length and the relevance of the domain name) which collected over 1,000 subscribers in just a few weeks.
Now Liquidware Labs proceeds with a second acquisition: Entrigue Systems.
Entrigue is small US company founded in 2000 which offers a product called Script Start.
Script Start is able to create, provision and remotely manage the Windows user profiles (what the industry is now calling persona).
It also does other things like software/hardware inventory, but most of all it supports presentation virtualization environments like Citrix XenApp, VDI environments like VMware View and even enterprise desktop virtualization wrappers like Microsoft MED-V.
Entrigue used to offer an open source version of Script Start which lacks of some enterprise features. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem that Liquidware Labs saved this edition during the acquisition.
This move is extremely interesting. The technology acquired from VMsight puts Liquidware Labs in the area of VDI optimization, not persona management. So why the company needs a product like Script Start?
It is entirely possible that Liquidware Labs is working to build some sort of automation to glue together the two things: the data collected by Stratusphere about the user activity in VDI environments could be analyzed to recognize the root cause of the bottlenecks and, according to that, the user profile could be optimized by ProfileUnity to improve the experience.
If so expect Liquidware Labs to acquire a company in the scripting/automation space soon, or at least announce a new product suite in the coming months.