Moka5 is a US startup launched two years ago with the ambitious mission to revolutionize the desktop virtualization market.
The company product, LivePC, targeted the consumer market with some interesting features like an online library for virtual machines downloading and the capability to update the VMs without redistributing them entirely.
But in two years LivePC, which is a feature-rich wrapper around VMware Player, could never reach the 1.0 milestone and its diffusion remained limited.
Additionally, the company radically changed its management team over time, replacing the CEO, the VP of Engineering and the VP of Marketing.
Now the company also replaces its go to market strategy, changing the name (from moka5 to MokaFive), the corporate image (including both the logo and the website) and the target audience: the priority is now the SMB market.
The new offering is based on the Virtual Desktop Solution, which basically is a console to centralize the management of multiple LivePCs.
While the underlying engine didn’t change, this new product introduces some security capabilities (virtual machines encryption, expiration, signing) that companies like VMware (with ACE), Sentillion (with vThere) and Kidaro (with Workspaces, now acquired by Microsoft) use to offer since some years.
And even if the company is now fully committed to the corporate market, the consumer one wasn’t left behind: the original LivePC solution, now called MokaFive Express Solution, is now a free of charge product with the same popular capabilities offered in the last two years.
Both products aren’t ready anyway: customers will have to wait somewhere in this Q2 2008 to have them. Meanwhile a preview is available here.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been updated accordingly.