Provide centralized SaaS management services for your customers' existing Windows apps
Provide management services for your
customers' existing Windows apps
Many hosting providers, managed service providers, and service bureaus are considering different ways to offer their customers value. Hosting applications in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is one increasingly popular option.
But web applications have limitations, often in performance or features, and require the software vendor to completely reprogram their Windows software to work over a browser.
At the same time, traditional Windows software can be problematic for many end customers. The cost and pain of installation, license management, upgrades, and usage reporting are often considered “necessary evils” by customers—particularly those who have resource-intensive, graphics-heavy, or client-server applications that they rely on for their daily business.
The need for a SaaS model for Windows applications
Hosted web applications are most often successful when the core use case has the following requirements:
- A centrally managed store for information
- Multiple users in distributed locations
- A need for real-time updates
- A need for quick implementation
- Manageable cost
Businesses often use a monthly or quarterly pay-as-you-go schedule to use their SaaS applications. This allows them to save capital and even out their cash flow. Hosting providers who can make a business case like this can earn a percentage of monthly software rental fees if they offer apps—either theirs or a third party’s—for hosting and application delivery. This model can help differentiate a provider’s offerings, attract new prospects, and establish a recurring revenue stream for hosted applications.
For today’s business applications, companies who have some of the above business requirements would like to use virtual application delivery in the Cloud to reduce costs and improve management. But there are many hosting providers whose solutions are simply “Cloud for Cloud’s Sake”: they offer dumbed-down, slow versions of their customers’ valuable, high-powered Windows applications. This results in poor performance and lower user productivity—and unhappy clients.
The answer is an application streaming solution that runs 100% of Windows applications with no re-engineering, as if the applications were locally installed, with the centralized management of SaaS, and with complete integration to the current system that hosting providers have for web apps.
Application Jukebox™ software from Endeavors Technologies meets all these requirements for successful cloud application virtualization.
Central hosting, local processing for Windows apps in the Cloud
As a hosting provider, you convert the Windows application to a Cloud-ready package, and make that package available on a server in the Cloud. Unlike other streaming technologies, Application Jukebox streams the Windows application to an encrypted cache on the client machine (using Application Jukebox Player), then uses the client processor to run the application.
Your clients launch the app, and it behaves as if the application were locally installed. There is no performance hit often associated with web applications.
This works for all Windows applications—the Application Jukebox team has not yet come across any application that doesn’t work well through the Application Jukebox Player. (Yes, even heavyweight, complex apps like AutoCAD and Photoshop.)
Because Application Jukebox runs 100% of Windows applications, there’s no need to mix different application delivery solutions that can complicate management. Hosting providers and service bureaus do not need to manage both Web apps and locally installed applications. Application Jukebox extends the revenue model that you get with your existing SaaS marketplace.
Advantages for your clients when you provide Windows apps through SaaS delivery
Application Jukebox Player is a small piece of client software, roughly the size of an IM client (about 25 MB). It can be distributed as part of any hosting provider’s offering. When the users sign in, they can have their appropriate applications and resources almost instantly published to them.
The way users launch applications is not based in a browser or in a piece of proprietary software.
The applications are published to the Start Menu, and the applications can all have shortcuts on the desktop. If customers are running a traditional PC environment today, chances are that Application Jukebox will provide users their non-Web applications that look exactly the same as what they’re currently doing.
That means high levels of user satisfaction, and almost no time spent teaching non-tech-savvy users how to access their applications in ways that are foreign to them. This can save hours of time in user training, and help desk calls, as well as increased productivity for hosting providers’ customers.
