Viewfinity Updates Cloud-Based Systems Management Package

Welcome to summer. Tech-Ed is over, and the E3 consumer-electronics show has left us with a dearth of enterprise-technology news. So, we're going to take this opportunity to talk about some vendors and subjects we don't often cover.

First up this week is Viewfinity, a systems management company that's taking on the likes of BeyondTrust with a cloud-based package that offers privilege management, patch management and operating-system deployment, among other functions.

Greatest among these, at least in terms of customer interest, is privilege management, says company president Gil Rapaport, who dined with your editor at lunchtime today. "Seventy-five percent of our pipeline and demand is privilege management," he said.

It's not hard to understand why. Most companies take a binary approach to issuing user privileges -- they either open the gates to PCs completely or lock them up tight. Viewfinity's goal is to let IT professionals find a happy medium -- for instance, users should be able to change the time zones on their machines, but letting them download music-sharing applications or large video files is something most administrators would like to avoid.

Version 3.0 of Viewfinity's suite makes that kind of balanced administration possible, and it does it using a native cloud platform -- the company has built its applications for the cloud from the beginning (although customers do have the option of using a purely vendor-hosted service or setting up a "private cloud" inside their own walls). That's a big deal, said Rapaport, who noted that a lot of vendors have trouble porting on-premises applications to the cloud.

He also noted that a cloud model lets Viewfinity get updates easily and quickly to mobile workers, whose numbers are increasing all the time. "With us, install an application and all the sales representatives will get policies within five minutes," Rapaport said.

Viewfinity is wading into some tough waters competing in a hot market, but its offering is intriguing. It's also looking for partners, so there's a channel angle here -- which is good given that RCPU is a channel-focused newsletter.

Partners, which interesting third-party vendors are you working with now? (PR folks, please resist the temptation to respond to this query -- we're looking for feedback from partners here. Thanks.) Send your responses to lpender@rcpmag.com.

Posted by Lee Pender on June 14, 2010 at 11:56 AM