AppSense Targets Future Growth in Endpoint Security, Windows 10 Migration

LAS VEGAS — AppSense, which calls itself a user-environment management firm, plans to strike it big this year in two key areas: endpoint security and Windows 10 migration.

In an interview with Channel Partners, Jon Rolls, AppSense’s vice president of product management, discussed his company’s plans to capitalize on the success it experienced during the second half of 2015. AppSense is participating in this week’s Citrix Summit 2016 in Las Vegas.

“The last six months have been fantastic; we closed the largest deals in our history and we’ve seen more and more of our business going through our partner network than ever before,” he said. “We have about 3,500 customers now, including government, finance, health care and education. We have everything from the small wetsuit manufacturer up to ministry of defense.”

Rolls attributes the success to “a lot of maturity” as AppSense spent the last two years working on product quality, listening to customers and enabling its partner network. The company has about 200 partners.

“The fact that we have really great partners to work with, increasingly able to run with the product and do quality implementations themselves, has made it much easier to scale,” he said.

AppSense launched its global partner program about a year ago and soon plans to announce enhancements. The program includes four partner tiers: silver, gold, gold plus and platinum.{ad}

“We just wanted to work more closely with particular partners that are investing in us,” Rolls said. “It was a natural evolution of what we’re trying to do and recognizing partners who have been most successful and achieved results.”

AppSense also plans to announce new products later this year focused on endpoint security and Windows 10 migrations, he said. Without even trying to be an endpoint security player, the company has been “outselling many security startups,” he said.

“We’re going to be doing a little prototyping … not that we’re distracting ourselves from our traditional core business, but those are definitely the growth areas, they’re the hot ones right now,” Rolls said.

There are 600-800 million Windows desktops in business and so far …

{vpipagebreak}

… “we’ve scratched about 1 percent of that,” he said.

Windows 10 is poised to become the most widely installed version of Windows ever, following the path of Windows XP and Windows 7 before it, according to Gartner. The research firm predicts that half of enterprises will have started Windows 10 deployments by January 2017.

“Windows 10 migration is interesting,” Rolls said. “Everyone sees the consumer experience, the non-business user, and they buy a Surface Pro or upgrade to Windows 10, and they’re like ‘well, that worked.’ In the enterprise world it’s different because there [are] a lot more applications involved, and a lot more files and folders that you can’t risk losing. The whole migration process is much more difficult, so that’s where we come in with our partners.”

In addition, AppSense plans to pursue more revenue opportunities in industry verticals, Rolls said.

“There [are] more verticals that we want to expand in,” he said. “We want to make sure we keep our health-care coverage going, we’re doing a lot in government, and finance seems to be doing great for us because we just signed a big finance deal. So it’s more getting deeper into vertical industries than it is getting into geographies.”

Meantime, AppSense on Monday joined the Nutanix Elevate Technology Alliance Partner Program and earned the “Nutanix Ready” validation. The companies say that by using their products together, enterprises can use hyperconverged infrastructure to simplify the deployment of virtual desktops.