Save a bundle this Halloween!

With our special offers, valid until November 30, 2009, there is nothing to be afraid of. Save a lot of money with our Halloween Bundles:

 

Halloween Bundle 1:

Buy one visionapp OpsQuick 2009 License and you will get two additional visionapp Remote Desktop 2010 Licenses (incl. 1 year Upgrade and Support)

Price: $499.00 / €359.00 / £289.00
You save: $198.00 / €138.00 / £110.00

Halloween Bundle 2:

Buy one visionapp Remote Desktop 2010 Country license incl. 1 year upgrade and support (unlimited number of administrators in one country for one company) and you will get 3 additional licenses of visionapp OpsQuick 2009 (incl. 1 year upgrade and support).

Price: $2190.00 / €1490.00 / £1090.00
You save: $1497.00 / €1077.00 / £867.00

Halloween Bundle 3:

3. Buy one visionapp Remote Desktop 2010 Global license incl. 1 year upgrade and support (unlimited amount of administrators worldwide for one company) and you will get 5 additional visionapp OpsQuick 2009 license (incl. 1 year upgrade and support).

Price: $3590.00 / €2390.00 / £1690.00
You save: $2495.00 / €1795.00 / £1445.00

*All prices listed on this page are excl. VAT and/or tax if applicable.

Network Computing’s article on OpsQuick 2009

Werner Leith of Network Computing wrote a German-language overview of visionapp OpsQuick 2009, published on the Network Computing German website on July 29, 2009. A rough translation into English is below.

Licensing per administrator

visionapp facilitates distribution of Windows operating systems

OpsQuick from visionapp distributes and updates Windows server and client operating systems automatically. The solution, which requires Microsoft Windows Deployment Services, can be used for both physical and virtual machines.

Windows Deployment Services (WDS) gives Microsoft a free product that distributes Windows operating systems in the network. WDS is the successor of Remote Installation Service. visionapp extends WDS with the OpsQuick by some interesting functions. In addition, the solution is to easier to use than WDS. Unlike WDS, OpsQuick can for instance use an unsupervised installation with different images. The software can also distributes images with the help of a bootable DVD.

OpsQuick can distribute images independent of the type of computer. The software adapts the names of computers to the enterprise guidelines. In addition, the solution makes operating system adjustments as a function of specific servers, workstation objects, or operating system images. For instance, the visionapp software will not allow a client computer to receive a server operating system, because the equipment is incompatible.

OpsQuick uses multicast for the Windows distribution… The software has a means to collect personalization information for the operating systems. For installation over several locations, Opsquick supports local distribution servers.

OpsQuick supports Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows XP/Vista, or Windows 7 Release Candidate. The licensing is per administrator, not per server, and is $399.

vRD 2010 now available!

The wait is over — vRD 2010 is here!

visionapp Remote Desktop is trusted by over 200,000 users, and is the #1 remote desktop tool on the market. The new vRD 2010 adds  the ability to launch any external application from within the vRD console. For example, you can ping other machines or restart the web services on a remote server — all without leaving the console!

Another new feature that many customers are excited about is our new granular rights management for all admins. If you use vRD within a group of admins, now you can specify which admins can access specific machines or modify specific connections.

Download vRD 2010 today! If you’re already a vRD customer with a current Upgrade and Support License, you can simply import your vRD 2009 license and begin! If not, vRD 2010 is only $99 (and there’s a freeware version, too!).

vRD 2010 release delayed until September 7

The overwhelming success of vRD has an unfortunate drawback: hundreds of thousands of vRD customers have thousands of different migration scenarios to vRD 2010. While we quality tested the vast majority of these scenarios, we uncovered a few scenarios that needed to be improved. visionapp is committed to delivering the highest quality software. Therefore, we have postponed the vRD 2010 release for about one week to make sure that our vRD customers have the smoothest migration to vRD and the best experience possible. We apologize for the delay and any inconvenience.

If you don’t yet own vRD 2009 and need vRD functionality in the next few days, please download vRD 2009 (and make sure you enter your e-mail address so you get notified when vRD 2010 is available) then purchase a vRD 2010 license (which you can buy in the online shop, through our partner network, or directly from visionapp) which will work perfectly with vRD 2009, and you’ll be able to upgrade at no cost as soon as vRD 2010 is available.

If you have any questions or need any help implementing this workaround, please visit our support forum.

vRD 2010 to be launched at VMunderground (SF, August 30)

visionapp is going to release visionapp Remote Desktop (vRD) 2010 on September 1, 2009 — and will launch it two days beforehand — this Sunday!

visionapp will launch vRD 2010 in North America at VMunderground, a tech event and party the night before the VMworld show opens in San Francisco. VMunderground will be Sunday, August 30, 2009, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. at Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, 661 Howard Street, San Francisco.

More than 200,000 IT administrators in over 50 countries are already using visionapp Remote Desktop, making it the market leader in multi-protocol remote desktop tools.“vRD has gained popularity with each version,” said Chuck Fritz, President and CEO of visionapp North America. “vRD 2010 adds the ability to launch external applications from within the vRD console. Engineers and IT admins tell us that functionality will save them hours of time.” This new feature allows the integration of any required tool, such as interfaces, connectivity reporting tools, support forums, and management boards.

vRD has been well received in the Windows administrator community. “I use visionapp Remote Desktop every single day,” said Tim Mendenhall of SeamonWhiteside + Associates. “It has become a staple point of my desktop support routine. A good 80% of my time is saved not having to visit computers directly or look them up manually.”

visionapp engineers spent months getting customer feedback on vRD 2009 to build vRD 2010. New features include an Autostart function (which allows connections to be restored automatically when the program starts up), database mode extensions, and granular rights management for all admins.

vRD 2010 will install on Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 3 or higher), Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008,  Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Both x86 and x64 platforms are supported, both English and German are supported, and vRD has license options for a single administrator, a country company license, or a global license. More information is available at http://www.vRD2010.com.

Until August 31, you can buy vRD 2009 at a Hot Summer Special discount and upgrade free to vRD 2010.

Video: visionapp at BriForum’s demo lab

Over at BrianMadden.com, they’ve posted a video of our CTO Rick Dehlinger demonstrating visionapp’s products, vWM and vSM.

OpsQuick review on DABCC

Michael Keen, DABCC’s Business & Technology Agility Analyst, just wrote a review of visionapp’s new OpsQuick 2009 Windows OS image capture and deploy product.

Keen’s take is that OpsQuick can help businesses add standardization into their IT departments, making change (in this case, Windows upgrades or new Windows installations) less onerous. That is certainly one of visionapp’s core tenets with its Server Management product, and I’m glad Keen has seen how OpsQuick can help in this area too.

In addition to Keen’s rave review (my favorite quote is “visionapp has a winner here with OpsQuick and I highly recommend you test drive this product for yourself“)…

OpsQuick has also gotten 5-star reviews from FreshShare and Soft82 in the last couple of weeks.

visionapp at BriForum 2009

Hey Chicagoans — visionapp is at BriForum 2009 at the Chicago Hilton starting tomorrow morning (Tuesday, July 21). Visit visionapp in Booth 8, and make sure to see a demo of our new OpsQuick™ OS deployment tool.

Our CTO, Rick Dehlinger, is co-leading some of the technical sessions, including:

• Tech Therapy: TS vs. VDI – an “alternative format” session that explores the battle between TS and VDI. Come join Dr. Karl Friedrisch von Dehlingerhausen as he attempts to help Terrence Singletary and Viktor Dean Ignacio sort out their differences and accept the things they share in common. (Brian Madden and Dr. Bernard Tritsch play the parts of Terry and Vik.) 1 p.m. on Thursday.
• Users vs. IT, a discussion on bridging the gap between making users more productive and making IT more compliant. Tranxition’s Amy Hodler is the co-presenter. 1 p.m. on Wednesday.

OpsQuick (new OS deployment tool) is released!

Woohoo! visionapp released OpsQuick™ 2009 today! The Windows deployment tool will be officially launched at BriForum 2009 next week in Chicago, but it heat the streets today. We’ve already gotten coverage on a few press sites, most notably CNBC, TMC, and Street Insider.

OpsQuick extends the power of Microsoft Windows Deployment Services (WDS, a component of Windows Server) to simplify and automate the creation, maintenance, and deployment of Windows operating systems to any physical or virtual machine platform.

The pricing and licensing model of OpsQuick should make things easier for many IT admins. It’s priced at $499 per admin (instead of per managed node/server/workstation). That means that a Windows admin could buy OpsQuick and manage all the servers and workstations in their company–and when the organization adds PCs and servers, that admin can manage those too, without paying additional licensing fees.

OpsQuick is also a pretty good value: in our internal tests, it’s just about as fast as the competition, but a company with two Windows administrators and 100 nodes might pay more than $2,500 for another product, but only $998 with OpsQuick.

And I think our marketing people are crazy, but they decided it wasn’t enough to be less than half the price, so until August 31, you can get it for $299 per admin, a 40% discount.

More information about OpsQuick is available at www.opsquick.com, where you can download 14-day evaluations and purchase through our online shop. I’ve heard a rumor or two that there will be a couple of folks reviewing OpsQuick soon, too, so I’ll make sure to post those links if and when they come out.

What do you want to see from OS Deployment software?

I’ve been going over some research in the server management space. A lot of research firms lump visionapp Server Management (vSM) with products that just do OS deployment, such as Ghost and Acronis. But some of the research has surprised me.

For instance, the research experts say that there’s no market for OS deployment tools for companies with under 500 managed nodes (servers + workstations). Yet in a recent survey, over half of the companies with under 250 workstations were using more than one OS deployment tool in their company!

I must confess that I don’t get the reason for this. Are OS deployment tools “purpose-built” — in other words, are some software titles better for certain deployments, and other software titles better for other deployments? I can leap to all sorts of conclusions over what this means — that no software out there is adequate for any one customer’s OS deployment needs, or that this software is based on specific user preferences, or that this software is so inexpensive that customers can afford to have more than one solution — but it’s all conjecture. And the research firms don’t have the answers.

So, if you use more than one OS deployment tool — why?