The US startup Liquidware Labs entered the capacity planning market in October 2009 with the first rebranded version of vmSight, the company/product acquired exactly one year ago.
That first product was called Stratusphere 4.5 which the company updates today to version 4.6.
Stratusphere 4.6 ships with new features:
- an assessment technique that allows to monitor users by attaching a stealth agent to their Microsoft Active Directory account through Group Policy
- a user experience calibration technique (Stratusphere UX) that measures the performance of their existing workstation and allows IT administrators to define them and good or bad to set a baseline metric. As soon as performance further degrades IT administrators are notified.
- a performance comparison system that analyzes the user desktop performance before and after any implementation of Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View.
(the company is selling this as an effortless system to validate or not proof of concepts but there’s no reason to not use it besides that phase of any VDI implementation project)
Compared to Lanamark, which recently decided to revisit its strategy to directly approach customers, Liquidware Labs sticks with exclusive availability through service providers.