AppSense, the leading provider of enterprise workspace management solutions, today announced updates to DesktopNow - its industry-leading software suite for virtual and physical desktop management. The enhancements include support for heterogeneous enterprise architectures, an even better user experience, and improved scalability and performance. AppSense customers will benefit from leveraging existing and anticipated infrastructure investments, enhanced user productivity and acceptance, and streamlined workspace management upgrades.

“At AppSense, we understand the complex challenges our customers face delivering a secure, productive workspace,” said Ravi Khatod, SVP Marketing of AppSense. “The upgraded DesktopNow Suite delivers unparalleled scale, flexibility and performance for enterprise environments.”

These updates follow a highly successful year for AppSense. The company delivered record bookings in the first half of its fiscal year, with a 50% increase in the number of customers spending over $1 million vs. prior year. In addition, over 500 enterprise customers purchased AppSense software for the first time in 2013.

Extended Heterogeneous Support for Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix
The DesktopNow suite includes enhanced support for Microsoft and VMware desktop deployments.   As enterprise IT becomes more diverse, AppSense is expanding its offerings to ensure that its customers can continue to deliver seamless and personalised user experiences, regardless of the various vendors they use in their environments.

DesktopNow now integrates with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.1, with full integration and support for System Center 2012. The built-in connection to System Center allows customers to save AppSense configurations directly to SCCM for deployment.

The updates also include support for VMware ThinApp, AppSense’s latest application virtualisation partner (see previous release on ThinApp integration).

DesktopNow also extends integration with Citrix XenDesktop®-  including the latest release XenDesktop 7.5. When used in conjunction with XenDesktop and XenApp®, the AppSense DesktopNow suite delivers increased user density per server, seamless, personalised roaming between physical desktops, virtual desktops and virtual sessions (Terminal Server/RDSH), control of users admin rights, and granular control of application performance to deliver an optimised experience for all user types.

Improved Policy and Efficiency Controls for Workforce Productivity
The new DesktopNow Suite also includes improved granular policy controls, allowing business owners to provide a tailored set of resources and tools specific user groups need to be most productive without impacting the experience of users in other departments, or conflicting corporate security practices. For example, in a financial services environment DesktopNow helps ensure traders have access to trading applications taking financial feeds from their nearest servers, but can provide a different set of options in the same application for researchers.  In healthcare, policy controls ensure that healthcare workers and caregivers always use the scanners or readers closest to their locations, while privacy regulations are fulfilled.

AppSense has also expanded replication options to make sure users across locations can access the applications and resources they need.  DesktopNow includes improved support for replicated databases across multiple sites and locations, and added support for highly distributed Active Directory infrastructure, as well as for federated IT teams.

Solving the Challenges of Desktop Deployments at Scale
AppSense has invested significant resources to help meet and exceed customer performance demands at scale. As a result, the baseline AppSense Enterprise Readiness Environment can support hundreds of thousands of endpoints. In real world environments, AppSense customers have already deployed over 146,000 endpoints and counting.

In addition, enhanced deployment options improve compatibility and performance. With .MSP files and patching support, users have the ability to patch agents and provide incremental updates when deploying service packs and hotfixes. The additional support allows customers to deploy and rollback the product, while enabling the software to be updated in a more agile way, helping to mitigate risk and improve efficiencies.