I’m really excited about Centrix Software‘s announcement today of the availability of its two new offerings – WorkSpace Discovery and WorkSpace iQ. This small company, with less than £10 million annual turnover is based just round the corner from me in Newbury, more famous as the home of Vodafone. But it’s a small company with big ambition and good experience and with some well known faces.
I’ve noted before that Cloud Computing is taking off fastest with consumers (who use free email and social media applications) and Small and Medium Enterprises (who have relatively simple business IT infrastructures). Centrix is trying to help large organisations by providing excellent free discovery, application aggregation and management. It has some clear views on how to unjumble the difficult tasks of mixing inhouse and outhouse applications and providing the glue to set up Cloud based self-service provisioning.
Up until now it the well-known Cloud Computing mega suppliers such as Google and Amazon have been the first to offer application development, while the system suppliers such as IBM, HP and Oracle/Sun have been building up from their data centre consolidation services. Software virtualisation and other infrastructure components are being also provided by companies such as VMWare, Citrix and Xen.
Centrix, however has a refreshing approach – looking to help IT managers in big companies tackle the difficulties of modifying their very complex application mix through monitoring and metering actual application use and licence utilization from the device and user level through to physical servers. It promises to allow organisations to assess the level of their virtualisation maturity and draw up plans for investment. Most impressively it claims to help deliver significant savings through demonstrating the overspend on licenses as companies move through virtualisation to Cloud adoption.
I will wrote more of the technical approach in a later post, but wanted to let you know of its arrival as a player in this important market. Let me know if you already have experience of using Centrix offerings by commenting on this article.