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• Business Efficiency Award

Winner: Kaviza VDI-in-a-box

Simply affordable virtual desktops that reduce costs and complexity

• Process Improvement Award

Winner: App-DNA AppTitude

A compatibility testing solution that can provide a rapid assessment of 100 percent of an organization's applications, saving months of manual testing and reducing costs

• Workforce Productivity Award

Winner: Avistar C3 Integrator – Citrix Edition

Optimizes media processing at the terminal, while application control and functionality continue to run in the virtualized environment or datacenter, to provide a true, media-rich experience

• Best of Show Award

Winner: App-DNA AppTitude

Thanks to all the Synergy sponsors that participated in this inaugural Best of Synergy program, and to all of you who took the time to vote for your favorites.

Kaviza VDI-in-a-box: Simply Affordable virtual desktops
Business Efficiency Award

Kaviza VDI-in-a-boxTM reduces cost and complexity through two innovative software components.

First it has developed software that uses individual commodity servers with direct attached storage to create a highly-available grid of servers that scale on-demand. Adding new servers to the grid takes just minutes since the Kaviza software automatically reconfigures the grid to incorporate the new server.

Second it has developed software that abstracts away the complexities associated with virtualization and the grid with a management layer that portrays the grid as if it were one large logical server -- and that provides a lingua franca that is specific to desktop management.

As a result, the existing desktop IT staff that procures and manages PCs today can readily deploy and manage Kaviza without re-training. All of this translates into large cost savings – and without organizational upheavals.

http://www.kaviza.com

3PAR InServ® Storage Server with Support for Citrix XenServer®
Business Efficiency Award

3PAR InServ arrays increase virtual server performance without sacrificing reliability, which allows customers to double the number of virtual machines configurable per physical server (also known as “VM density”). As a result, joint 3PAR and Citrix XenServer customers purchase and deploy up to 50% fewer physical servers.

In addition, 3PAR InServ arrays reduce customer storage administration time by up to 90% and include autonomic storage management features designed to complement the streamlined management of Citrix XenCenter. Hyper-efficient 3PAR arrays also reduce customer storage capacity requirements by up to 75% by breaking the traditional link between allocated and purchased capacity.

3PAR’s Get Thin Guarantee program can guarantee that customers converting from existing “fat” volumes on legacy storage to new thin volumes on the InServ will reduce storage capacity necessary to support XenServer by at least 50%.

http://www.3par.com

Liquidware Labs Stratusphere v4.6
Business Efficiency Award

Stratusphere invokes patented technology to track usage and performance of physical and virtual desktop infrastructure and deployments. The solution delivers a fitness rating of desktop infrastructure, giving organizations the information they need to plan, design, and roll-out next-generation desktop technology.

After roll-out, Stratusphere uses proprietary metrics to assign individual user experience ratings that provides IT staff with the information needed to identify problems before they occur. ProfileUnity migrates and transforms user personalization, resulting in user profiles that are completely portable across heterogeneous Windows environments. ProfileUnity Pro adds user configuration features that enable administrators to centrally configure and deploy user settings.

All of this delivers centralized user personalization control, enforcement, and portability to the enterprise.

http://www.liquidwarelabs.com

Avistar C3 Integrator™ - Citrix Edition
Workforce Productivity Award

As growing numbers of enterprises adopt thin and virtual computing environments, applications and processing needs are moving from the desktop to the data center. While this transition provides outstanding operational and cost improvements, and is ideal for data-centric applications, it has been a difficult transition for communication, rich media and interactive solutions to make.

With the Avistar C3 Integrator™ – Citrix Edition solution, media processing is optimized at the terminal, while application control and functionality continue to run in the virtualized environment or data center. Using this architecture, the terminal avoids transmitting uncompressed audio or video, minimizing transmission delays and ensuring the network is not overburdened. Server application code and communications APIs remain unchanged, ensuring the retention of Citrix’s cost and operational benefits and operation in an optimized infrastructure.

By using the Avistar C3 Integrator™ – Citrix Edition solution, enterprises reduce operational cost and centralize control that are hallmarks of distributed architectures, with the added benefit of a true, media-rich visual communications experience.

http://www.avistar.com

LanSchool v7.4 Training Management Software
Workforce Productivity Award

Teachers today are faced with the challenge and opportunity of using technology to teach. Computers are amazing educational tools, but they can also be a huge distraction to learning in all types of digital classroom settings. The Internet, instant messaging, email and games are a constant temptation for students.

LanSchool v7.4 removes these distractions so that teaching can be more effective. LanSchool v7.4 helps: facilitate learning by allowing the teacher to show their screen to the students; remove distractions like the Internet, applications, USB drives and printing; keep students on task through real-time thumbnail monitoring; get student’s attention by blanking out their screens; assist students through remote control and chat; and assess student understanding through student testing.

LanSchool v7.4 is used in schools, universities, hospitals and corporations throughout the world. Even very large companies, like Verizon Wireless, use LanSchool v7.4 in hundreds of their thin-client corporate training labs. LanSchool v7.4 runs natively on Macs, Windows and thin clients.

http://www.lanschool.com

SEP Sesam Citrix XenServer Extension
Workforce Productivity Award

The SEP Sesam Citrix XenServer Extension provides disaster recovery and online backup functionality. The recently redesigned SEP Sesam graphical user interface allows full control of the backup system to design, configure and implement a complete backup solution from SMB to enterprise environments.

With SEP Sesam, the precise depiction of the XenServer infrastructure is displayed in the GUI showing available virtual guest systems, all of which simplifies planning and execution of automated backup processes. Using SEP Sesam, no additional effort is required to backup and secure the XenServer environment. User organizations can now backup and restore the XenServer by choosing all running VM's, or a single VM – and restore to the old location or a new one.

By implementing a single, SEP Sesam backup solution, companies realize savings in operation expenses, time and manpower.

http://sepusa.com

AppTitude
Process Improvement Award

App-DNA’s AppTitude is a compatibility testing solution that can provide a rapid assessment of 100 percent of an organization's applications. It provides quick insight into an entire application portfolio of thousands of applications -- including custom and internally developed applications. All of this helps organizations avoid the expense and delay of manual testing.

Organizations considering virtualization can use AppTitude to test their entire application portfolio and determine which applications can be virtualized for specific supported virtualization platforms - with or without modification. It also enables IT to learn if applications play well together - an especially important factor when rolling out virtualization.

Empowering customers with knowledge about their applications – and the success those applications will have on XenApp – means faster and better testing and eventual conversion of applications to the XenApp Profile or the App-V SFT format. Ultimately, customers save months of manual testing, hours in application remediation -- and budget.

http://www.app-dna.com

NxTop 2.0
Process Improvement Award

NxTop 2.0 combines a centralized virtual desktop management system with a fully managed bare-metal client-side hypervisor to reduce desktop management costs while improving PC security and the end-user computing experience.

Many organizations considering virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions are drawn to the operational cost savings that come with centralized virtual desktop management, but many struggle to get their VDI projects off the ground for several reasons including: the capital cost of replacing commodity PC hardware with more expensive datacenter infrastructure; increased network demands; compromises to the end-user experience; and loss of mobility when more than half of the PCs corporations buy are laptops. Using NxTop, the IT staff avoids these common pitfalls and creates a single master virtual desktop for their organization.

Rather than executing the end-user desktop instances on the server and streaming them over a network to end-users, NxTop uniquely distributes a locally cached copy to execute locally on traditional desktop or laptop PC hardware. This model of centralized management with distributed execution provides the user with the rich computing experience they’ve enjoyed, avoids the data center and network upgrades that come with VDI, and is fully capable of running virtual desktops offline on laptop devices.

http://www.virtualcomputer.com