VMblog:  Your company is sponsoring at VMworld 2016.  Do you know where your booth will be located?  How can we find you?

Liquidware Labs:  Yes, we will be at VMworld, Las Vegas this year and you can find us at Booth 870.   

VMblog:  Is there anything interesting or unique about this year's booth setup?

Liquidware Labs:  Our theme will be about how we add value to VMware Horizon desktops. Customers get a capable virtual desktop solution with Horizon but our workspace environment management solutions can help make sure they choose the right level of Horizon (Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise) for their needs. Our Stratusphere UX (User Experience) solution does that with comprehensive Monitoring and Diagnostics to help grow and scale Horizon or hybrid-platform deployments while our ProfileUnity and FlexApp solutions add much more sophisticated advanced features for User Environment Management and Application Delivery.

VMblog:   Anything else going on at the show that we should know about?

Liquidware Labs:  Another helpful offering that we will be promoting at the show is a new online Cloud Login Analysis tool that VMworld attendees can find really helpful.  They say you only get one opportunity to make a first impression. In the world of desktop computing, that first impression is cast during the machine boot and login process.  You now have a great opportunity to get some important details about your login process to discover which processes may be a bottleneck and slow you down.  It's free and really easy with our cloud-based login analysis. Anyone who wants to check this out now can go to Liquidware Labs Cloud Tools today.

VMblog:  What do you like most about sponsoring VMworld?  Why is this a must sponsor event for your company?

Liquidware Labs:  First of all, our relationship with VMware is still strong, and we remain very relevant to VMware EUC solutions users.  Things are a little different today, because we offer solutions that have some overlap with their UEM and layering products.  VMware's solutions may offer baseline functionality in these areas, however, there are certainly scenarios where our products will offer enhanced value for the customer and be more appropriate for their environments.  In addition, customers who have licensed VMware Horizon Standard or Advanced can get greater value by adding our UEM and Layering solutions that have exclusive enterprise industry-leading features. We have a whitepaper that explains the correct uses cases for our solutions versus theirs, called VMware UEM and App Volumes Overviewfor anyone who wants to get a deep dive on this comparison.

As far as Stratusphere UX is concerned, it stands alone among desktop user experience monitoring and diagnostic tools and is the only solution that we know that has pretty much a 100% success rate of identifying bottlenecks and root causes of issues in customers' environments.  We have a really good case study of Orange Coast College (OCC) that shows how Stratusphere UX was applied to a greenfield VMware / HP environment and was absolutely essential to making that deployment work.

We love to show at VMworld because we always get such good response from the attendees who really get the importance and value of our products to their desktop computing requirements.

VMblog:  Can you give VMblog readers a sneak peek as to what you will be showing off at your booth this year?

Liquidware Labs:   We have had a number of important milestone releases of our products this year with a number of serious advancements that we will be demonstrating at VMworld.  A new version of Stratusphere UX -- 5.8.5 -- will be available right around show time. We're excited to be demonstrating a new search capability, which lowers the barrier of entry for newer IT admin staff. We'll also have some enhancements to our ICA/HDX Citrix metrics and greater depth to browser-based processes with the ability to tie resource consumption back to the domain and host.   We have some new hardware and application readiness reports available for those who are planning migrations to Windows 10.  And we have new Application Process GPU Metrics to better design, size, diagnose host-based GPU needs when looking to virtualize engineering or other graphics intensive applications.             

ProfileUnity and FlexApp also have some substantial new features that make these products even more pertinent to VMware environments.  We increased the speed of logins by 90% over previous versions of ProfileUnity.  Version 6.5.5 now includes new ADMX Templates Refine MS AD Integration, which makes it easier than ever to more efficiently execute Group Policies.  Also, we have enhanced support for VMDK use to mount user profiles and layered applications. So now you can use both VHD and VMDK in supporting hybrid, multi-platform environments.

We now include support for organizations running multiple VMware vCenter instances. These new features also support higher levels of desktop security and availability for large-scale enterprises running multiple vCenter deployments and "Active-Active" redundant infrastructures, such as government agencies or multi-national organizations.

Our FlexApp solution is now 60% more responsive in application delivery time - a significant improvement.   Also, as this solution is rolled out to more production environments, we are happy to report that we are building quite a sizeable roster of applications that we have successfully packaged and delivered.

VMblog:  Attendees always enjoy a good trade show tchotchke.  Are you guys giving away anything special or interesting this year?

Liquidware Labs:  Our theme - playing off on the fact that this is an election year -- is "Make Desktops Great Again," and we will be handing out shirts, so make a point to get to our booth early because last year we ran out by the second day!!   As always, our promotional shirts are made by a company called Rags of Honor, whose theme is "Buy a shirt and support a veteran."  Rags of Honor is an apparel company devoted to hiring veterans who are homeless or unemployed after serving their country. All of this merchandise was designed and printed in the U.S. by them. 100% of our purchase goes to operating Rags of Honor as a sustainable business employing as many vets as possible and paying them a living wage.  They also sell their own designs and you can see them at http://shop.ragsofhonor.us/

VMblog:  I know this isn't your first VMworld event as a sponsor.  Tell us, how many times have you sponsored before?

Liquidware Labs:  We have been at every VMworld since our founding in 2009.  The first year we were there, we were in a New Innovators kiosk.  We were one of the earliest companies to bet on EUC computing - not only for VMware environments but for all desktop platforms.  We just knew there had to be a better way to deliver desktops -  leveraging virtualization and other technologies.  Every year since then we have come back stronger as a company and with better, more advanced products.  And we have done this without huge venture capital investments, unlike a lot of our contemporaries.  Our formula for success is to do our homework, conduct a lot of research, make sure our products do what we say they will do and take care of our customers better than anyone else out there.  We have had customers say to us that they purchase from Liquidware Labs because they know they are going to be 100% supported -- not only with regard to helping them with our products but also with their actual desktop environments. The result is today, we are very healthy as a business and we have the best products of their kind on the market. So every VMworld is like going back to your high school reunion as the coolest guy there.  We wouldn't miss it.

VMblog:  What do you hope to come away with from exhibiting at VMworld?  What does event success look like to you?

Liquidware Labs:  Basically this is our greatest opportunity to network with old friends and colleagues and meet with new ones. We are always excited to participate in VMworld because we can socialize with like-minded people who grasp that we are in the midst of a desktop transformation process that is really unprecedented.  One of the fun things about going to VMworld is that each year we still meet new people and can educate them about the vision of next generation desktops.

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If you have a chance, go early and get one of those shirts.  Very cool!  Get Liquidware Labs on your must see list at VMworld 2016 to learn more about their workspace environment management solutions and more!  Make your way to booth 870 and talk with their expert crew, you won't be disappointed.