Neocleus is a US startup that entered the virtualization market in May 2008 without much fanfare (see virtualization.info coverage).
At that time, their Xen-based client hypervisor, Trusted Edge, was pitched as a secure endpoint platform that could be enriched by 3rd parties applications.
Two years after that, Neocleus still doesn’t get any significant traction despite many customers are well aware of (and very interested on) the client hypervisor concept because of its potential to deliver VDI in offline mode.
One reason for this lack of interest is that so far the startup made extremely complex to exactly understand the details of its product and to access it (the whole “drop us an email” argument doesn’t work well for a technology that is completely new and that faces severe skepticism about performance and hardware support).
So at the beginning of last week Neocleus announced a shift in its go-to-market strategy, with the release of NeoSphere, a version of Trusted Edge, that can be OEM’ed and extended by PC lifecycle management (PCLM), security and help desk vendors.
The first customer is the management vendor BigFix, according to Brian Madden.
Interestingly, every reference about Trusted Edge disappeared from the corporate website except a mention inside the original press announcement.