Centrix Software – Application Discovery For Cloud Computing

Centrix Highlights

• A small British consulting company moving to a be an ISV
• Excellent experience in understanding software assets in virtualised environment
• Arms users with information on current software deployment and usage
• Helps provide analysis of the difference between traditional licensing and pay-as-you go costs
• Offers a customisable portal for user access to corporate applications from disparate sources
• Should go on to add value to service providers and Cloud services companies once integrated with billing systems

Who Is Centrix Software?

Centrix is a small British company having shifted its focus away from IT services towards a software-based approach, providing essential tools for large companies planning to calculate and manage their software assets when moving (or thinking about moving) to Cloud Computing. I drove up the A34 from ITCandor to meet with executives Lewis Gee, Jane Rimmer and Paul Burke (pictured) at the company’s headquarters in Newbury.
I’ve been following the company for about a year – since it launched its WorkSpace iQ and Workspace Discovery products. This year it is also now focusing on WorkSpace Universal, which unifies the back-end provision of applications irrespective of their location.
Centrix currently employs only 35 people, with revenues of around £10 million. However it is growing, having been recruiting over the last 3-4 months and reports having doubled its R&D staff over the last year.
The executive’s experience comes from working at VMware and Citrix (Lewis) and Citrix and Trend Micro (Paul): Jane has worked at VMware and Citrix and I can remember her from her days at Sun in the 1990s.
The company itself has been going for over 10 years, originally providing consulting in virtualisation (especially Citrix server based computing) and software asset management, with a Microsoft view of users trying to transform their approach to software licensing. It’s great to meet a small company on its way up – in the meeting room there were some impressive sketches of the market according to Centrix left from an earlier brainstorming session.

Workspace iQ Arms Users With Software Usage Information For The Shift To Pay-As-Yo Go Software

Understanding your software assets is vital if you want to move to the Cloud, or even if you’re just uncertain about costs. Of course there are important calculations for software companies and users alike in adding any sort of pay-as-you go to traditional annual license spend. However there are many organisations (especially in the Public Sector) where the total number of licenses bought, who uses them and where is unknown. It was claimed that one of the world’s largest software companies had sold more licences to the government in California than there were citizens for instance. The lack of information stretches to recent purchases – Centrix made the point that many companies don’t know how many licenses they have for Salesforce.com for instance, especially since this SaaS application is typically purchased across-the park by non-IT departments of course.
Centrix’s main product is Workspace iQ (and its free-to-use version Workspace Discovery). It uses an agent-based approach to allow IT administrators to investigate all software, server and PC usage throughout an organisation. Using its own use as an example we looked at the servers, PCs and laptops, the software installed on them and statistics about how often they were used. This is a snapshot, rather than real-time approach, so its unlikely to see it incorporated into dashboards such as VMware’s vCenter for now. However it clearly provides great information on who uses what and supports decisions about how to rationalise if necessary. It can also provide information on the location of the user, helping organisations choose when to provide laptops, PCs or thin clients on the usage profile of remote and centralised applications.
Under-utilisation is a common issue. Centrix has discovered some alarming things about software usage and claims that up to 50% of all licenses aren’t used after the first installation. I’m a frequent user of Microsoft Powerpoint myself, but this is rarely the case in most organisations. By discovering its actual usage profile customers should be able to reduce their overall hardware and software asset spend. In the monitored, metered, pay-as-you-go future we’re entering users need to be better armed with information to calculate the costs of changing from traditional licensed models.
Centrix pointed out that discovering the machines, licenses and users is an important stage of a migration to Windows 7 as well, enabling companies to predict the total costs of upgrading – adding memory and disk in a targeted way rather than the typical ‘rip and replace’ approach. The software also allows organisations to understand remote verses office usage, which can help redraw laptop, desktop and even thin client policies.

WorkSpace Universal Aggregates Back-End Software Provisioning

WorkSpace Universal addresses the need for application aggregation, federation and presentation across disparate platforms and client devices. It includes a browser-based client software which is customisable at the corporate and personal level, dynamic search capabilities and ‘credential pass-thru’ which uses the built-in identity broker to manage the user’s credentials across multiple environments. Application delivery is possible from a number of diverse sources including published applications and virtual desktops from Citrix, VMware or Microsoft, web applications and/or Windows local applications.

Some Conclusions – Modern Infrastructure Management Software For Cloud Computing And Virtualisation

We’re seeing strong innovation in the Cloud Computing area coming from small companies such as 2X, RES Software, Palm Tree, Thinspace and Racemi. Centrix joins them with a new approach which deserves to become better known.
Many organisations are suffering from under-investment and an increasing demand from new (often Generation Y) users to integrate their new devices into the corporate environment. In many cases company applications is locked to specific physical devices, while the purchasing, and deployment of applications is unmanaged with costs unknown.
Centrix has taken the brave step of putting its consulting expertise into software products, which are simple to explain, but hard to develop. They allow IT staff to investigate and monitor how much they’re spending on software licenses, who uses what and where. With WorkSpace Universal they’re moving beyond discovery into portals to deliver applications within a corporate environment which bridge between physical and virtual clients, as well as centralised and remote servers. This is an important prototype of the service-desk approach needed for mixing in-house and Cloud services. Centrix has an excellent approach and I can see its software being adopted not just be end-user companies, since metering and monitoring has become a required function across the value chain for pay-as-you-go software. Once integrated into secure billing systems, this software will find a good home with service providers and other Cloud service providers alike.