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.

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.

Marketing lessons from HubSpot?

I attended a Webinar this morning for “Marketing In A Recession,” given by Mike Volpe who is a VP at HubSpot, and one of our marketing vendors.

One of his points was that during a recession, one must use marketing dollars more wisely and use “brains not budget.” For this, Volpe suggested, abandon your external marketing programs like print advertising, direct mail, and telesales, and implement programs in inbound marketing, especially social media. Start a blog, get on Twitter, create content; then publicize the living bejeezus out of it on Flickr and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and FriendFeed and Slideshare and everything else you can think of.

Having been to a few marketing events over the last three months, including the excellent MarketingProfs Digital Mixer, I believe that Volpe and HubSpot aren’t covering the whole story. For marketers who are used to outbound marketing–from the sound of it, the audience of this webinar–the message has to be completely different. For visionapp’s outbound marketing, we focus on special discounts, or features and benefits, or cost savings, or ROI. The goal is to get people interested enough to enter the sales process.

However, for inbound marketing, and particularly in social media, almost no one will be interested in entering that sales process. Many of them got on Twitter because there was too much noise in their e-mail inbox. No one wants to have a conversation with someone who simply sends out sales messages. These new marketing media are vastly unexplored territory, and companies have been told (by many competent social media specialists) that traditional marketing messages and sales pitches absolutely do not work on Twitter or in blogs. No one will come to read your content if your content is simply a marketing message.

I haven’t figured out a way yet to get visionapp customers to enter into the conversation that visionapp employees are having internally–conversations that I really want prospects and customers to provide input on. Questions like, “Do you really think the iPhone ICA client is going to be a success, and will it drive XenApp use in the enterprise?” I’ve put that question out on Twitter and Facebook to no avail. Maybe that means that no one is interested in these topics; maybe it just means that very few people know about visionapp and what we do! But it definitely means that getting our name–and educating our audience–is going to require more than the “if you tweet it, they will come” attitude that Volpe and many, many other marketing pundits are advocating.

Twitter: public relations and customer service

Twitter, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a microblogging site. Users post messages (“tweets”) of 140 characters or less that the whole world can see (at least, if the whole world knows your username). There is an emerging industry devoted to Twitter and similar technologies for use in marketing; I even went to the MarketingProfs conference in October where an entire track was dedicated to “Social Media” — which essentially meant everyone was talking about Twitter.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, Twitter has been great for customer service. Comcast has several of their most active customer service reps on Twitter, and the anecdotal evidence has been that Twitter has been essential to Comcast’s improved customer service.

I think Twitter can help visionapp’s customer service in North America: as the most recent addition to the visionapp international family, visionapp NA depends on the customer support in Germany as well as a limited number of USA-based engineers to fill out its customer service profile. This is one place where Twitter can come in handy; by tweeting @visionapp, customers can reach us more quickly, allowing us to hopefully solve their problems faster.

Also, I just became aware of @micropr, a Twitter-based public relations tool where journalists, bloggers, and analysts can ask for contact in different areas. As soon as I signed up, I saw three requests for cloud computing and software-as-a-service, which are areas visionapp plays in pretty heavily–especially going forward.

I’ve done a bit of research that the majority of our customers can’t access Twitter at work because their Web filters block it. However, I’ve got a contact at Websense who says that business-related Twitter traffic is on the rise, and they’re trying to figure out how to filter the wheat from the chaff in the tweets. Users can likely use third-party apps like TweetDeck to get around this problem for the moment, but for an enterprise software audience, that’s a pretty big hill to climb. However, if the IT department knows they can get instant customer service from @visionapp (and other companies), perhaps they’ll turn off their Twitter filter for certain user populations.

Building an infrastructure factory

visionapp, CentriServ, and DevonIT want to help you turn IT into a competitive advantage for your business. To learn how your business can increase productivity and save your IT budget, we’re hosting a webinar on improving user productivity and reducing administrative costs with a Citrix environment.

Title: Building an Infrastructure Factory
Date: Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EST

Speakers include:
Chief Technologist of visionapp: Rick Dehlinger
Director of Professional Services at CentriServ: Jared G. Hoover

Space is limited. Reserve your Webinar seat now.

Migrating to XenApp 5

If you and/or your customers have questions about migrating to Citrix XenApp 5, visionapp has just published a paper detailing best practices and how to enforce an effective migration methodology. The paper is available on a few sites, including eMediaUSA, KnowledgeStorm, and BitPipe.

Here’s one of the links:
Citrix XenApp 5: Preparing for a Successful Migration (registration may be required)

Write a comment to let us know what you think!

Connecting with the Citrix communities

It recently came to my attention that my attempts to reach (and promote) a visionapp community via Twitter and Facebook might be falling on deaf ears. The reason? Web filtering software, such as Websense and Webwasher, are being used by our B2B customers’ IT groups to block the very social media sites where visionapp is attempting to talk about best practices to migrate to XenApp 5 or different options for remote desktop tools.

I’m hoping that WordPress isn’t one of those websites that are also blocked by those web filters — and that you can tell me what websites and blogs you get your Citrix information from. I know Doug Brown (DABCC.com) and Brian Madden (brianmadden.com) both have very usercentric sites for Citrix admins and thought leaders. Anyone have other favorite blogs or sites? And — does your organization also block Twitter and Facebook at work?

vWM cleared of all steroid charges!

When vWM won the gold two weeks ago, vWM customers weren’t surprised. But allegations of vWM being “Web Interface on Steroids” sullied vWM’s good name. But vWM wasn’t giving up: it challenged the investigators to a complete battery of tests that have never been given before in a software steroid investigation. The result? Only superior software engineering was found—no steroids.

After a brutal weeklong investigation, chief investigator Will Emmett Columbia cleared vWM of all charges. “While vWM may be able to support multiple technologies and offer customization beyond anything I’ve ever seen,” said Columbia, “all evidence exonerates vWM—there’s no evidence of malfeasance.”

Columbia continued, “If you have Web Interface, you’d be crazy not to look at vWM.”

vWM said in a prepared statement, “I knew I was innocent, and I’m looking forward to getting back to work—not just for me, but for the thousands of people who depend on me every day.”

Performance Enhancement Debacle!

What will happen to visionapp’s Gold medals?

Industry leader visionapp is facing the media today amid a firestorm of accusations. After winning a gold medal in the User Productivity event and sweeping the Customization Relay, visionapp Workspace Management (vWM) has been accused of using performance-enhancing drugs.

In July 2008, chief technologist Rick Dehlinger bragged to customers that vWM was like “Citrix® Web Interface on steroids.”

Indeed, the gold medals in both events were awarded to visionapp, based on vWM’s ability to support Citrix XenApp, streaming, Microsoft TS, and even local apps. In addition, users and admins can customize dozens of elements in vWM, changing how the Workspace is presented to each user.

In a prepared statement, the IOC reported, “We began to suspect vWM when we discovered that everything could be managed from the same console as other visionapp products. Then we found out that vWM can support content in different languages without requiring separate web servers!”

A vWM customer who wished to remain anonymous, said, “I’m not sure how vWM can do everything it can do without some sort of unfair competitive advantage.” The customer added, “Steroids or no steroids, you can take my vWM when you pry it out of my cold, dead hand.”

I’ll post more when I know more…

Gold medal in user productivity!

Wow, what a fantastic day in Beijing.

Our visionapp Workspace Management software won the Gold in 2 — count ‘em, 2 — events: User Productivity, and the Customization Relay (along with teammates Server Management and Control Center).

It’s not Michael Phelps or anything, but with 4 years of training, hard work, and updates, we could overwhelm London and sweep the software events in ‘12.

I’m not sure what was more impressive for the judges: the users’ ability to customize languages? the support for Citrix, TS, streaming and local apps on the same interface? Whatever it was, the visionapp anthem never sounded so sweet. And our customers have never had an easier way to customize and enhance Citrix® Web Interface.

Nothing can stop us now. Nothing.