Articles by David Dupré

gPartner positions itself as a new generation of consultant, distributor and integrator for the SaaS market. Based in Paris and Lyon (France), gPartner is one of Google’s leading partners in the French market for the Google Enterprise family of products and services, with the expertise to integrate Google technologies in the core of the enterprise IT environment.

Seeking new ways to accelerate customer migration to online services, gPartner has turned to commonIT. With our Virtual Browser solution, the enterprise retains full control over end-user access to Cloud services through full management of the browser. Whether the need is for access and content filtering for security reasons, support for diverse end-point platforms and application environments, or to deliver transparent connectivity for end-users, Virtual Browser delivers performance and affordability.

The partnership with gPartner reinforces our positioning in the Cloud Services Brokerage market segment, where Virtual Browser facilitates and accelerates enterprise migration to Cloud Computing.

It’s nearly two years since we started commonIT, and with the Cloud Brokerage market fast becoming the new challenge we’ve decided we need to reorganise. The first phase in our development is coming to an end. We’ve successfully validated that our concept of virtualizing industry-standard web browsers to deliver more secure, less costly access to Cloud-based applications answers a genuine need in the market. This required a significant investment in R&D to develop and deliver a customer-ready product in line with our ideas. We’re now entering a new phase in which the key challenge will be to position our Virtual Browser solution as one of the pillars of what Gartner describes as “Cloud Brokerage”.

CommonIT needs to evolve to continue to develop successfully. We’re working on a new round of funding with the target of supporting a three-year development plan. In this context we’re sorry to have to announce the departure of Daniel, our CEO. Daniel leaves us for purely personal reasons which he felt he could not reconcile with the demands of the leadership role in this new phase of development for commonIT. The role of CEO falls to me, David, with Albino and Mathieu contining in their respective roles on the management team. Alongside this change we’ve decided to put in place a strategy committee composed of experts with significant strategy, legal and managerial skills. This “advisory board” will have a non-official role, guiding our strategy as we move forward.

In Gartner’s “Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2010″*, analysts David Cearley, Benoit Lheureux and Daryl Plummer present the “Cloud Brokerage”. This market is focused on technologies and services that improve security while reducing cost and complexity in cloud services access and management. This market presents a high potential and proliferates as cloud services consumers seek to simplify and improve their consumption of cloud services across multiple cloud services providers. In its “Hype Cycle” Gartner identifies commonIT as one of the seven sample vendors.

*Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2010, David Mitchell Smith, July 27, 2010.

The Cyberdefense security solution developed and introduced a few months ago by commonIT partner Hermitage Solutions is an outsourced SaaS-style “Security as a Service” offering. Targeting small and medium businesses, Cyberdefense offers a full range of security functions, resolving the increasingly complex technical challenges faced by SMBs with an end-to-end security solution delivering legal and regulatory compliance and even an insurance policy.

Hermitage Solutions has chosen our Virtual Browser technology as part of the Cyberdefense offering. Under an OEM agreement Hermitage and commonIT have integrated Virtual Browser as a component of the SaaS platform. The result for Hermitage is a simple, secure, and cost-effective response to customer needs for mobile and remote access. Cyberdefense users get remote Intranet and Windows desktop access (physical or virtual), using any available machine, easily and securely.

With the Cyberdefense offering Hermitage Solutions positions itself as a Managed Security Services Distributor (or MSSD), with Cyberdefense being offered through Hermitage’s reseller network.

Innovation is one of our core values; innovation gave birth to commonIT and continues to influence how we approach the decisions we make every day to develop our business. So it there was no hesitation when we decided to partner with the Telecommunications department of INSA Lyon as a sponsor of its “Projets Innovants” (Innovative Projects) program.

Three of the four co-founders of commonIT are graduates of INSA Lyon, one of France’s leading graduate engineering schools. But sponsoring the Projets innovants program is about more than just giving something back to the old school. The program, run by Stéphane Frénot (tutor/researcher) et Hugues Benoit-Cattin (head of department), targets engineering students in the 4th year of their studies. The objective is to give the students the tools and methodologies to drive technological innovation, and includes a 6-month project. As a sponsor commonIT will meet regularly with the participants to deliver practical recommendations drawn from our own experience. CommonIT will also be sponsoring a prize for the three most innovative projects with an awards ceremony when the program draws to a close in June.

Microsoft’s staged launch of Windows 7 during the latter half of 2009 has left enterprise system and network admins facing a dilemna. Is now the right time to migrate? And what are the issues?

Given the widely acknowledged lack of enthusiasm for Vista in the corporate network, this means migrating from XP — and the default browser in XP, IE6. For Microsoft, there’s no problem. IE8, integrated with Windows 7, offers “a faster, easier, safer web” (compared, we presume, to IE6 and IE7). The problem in the enterprise is that many applications were (naively) optimised for IE6, and are dependent on certain Microsoft proprietary “enhancements”… which were subsequently dropped in IE7 and IE8 as Microsoft moved to improve compliance with W3C standards.

Will migrating the desktop to Windows 7 mean re-writing enterprise applications to ensure compatibility? Is it cost-effective? Can it even be done? And if we do go through with it, can we be sure we won’t be faced with another costly re-write the next time MS updates IE?

Complicating the situation for today’s CIO even further, compatibility is now about much more than just following Microsoft’s roadmap for Internet Explorer. Your users are chosing Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome, with terminal devices become more and more diverse — user’s own PCs or laptops from home, mobile users running an unpredictable range of smartphones, netbooks and soon to arrive slate devices. As a system administrator, you no longer have the luxury of dictating the configuration of the end-point device. You’re expected to deliver a service irrespective of user choices of platform and browser. How many IT departments have the means to test and validate corporate web-based applications against multiple browsers running on multiple end-point devices?

Fortunately there’s a secure, cost-effective and future proof answer to the issues,. A solution which allows users running Windows 7 to access IE6 optimised applications and IE8, without the need to go through any sort of context switching or reconfiguration. The solution is Virtual Browser.

Virtual Browser allows you to migrate desktop PCs to Windows 7 while offering IE6 compatibility by virtualising the browser (IE6 — or any other industry standard browser), ensuring ongoing access to IE6-optimised applications, simultaneously with support for the most recent browser releases. In practice a fully optimised browser configuration (browser release, plugins, helper applications such as Flash and Java) is hosted by the Virtual Browser server and launched on demand for each user connection. Multi-browser support made easy — find out more from one of our customers here.

The new year starts with two media appearances for commonIT. The January 7th edition of 01Informatique, France’s leading weekly for IT professionals, dedicates (almost) a full page to commonIT — the founders, the first steps, the technology — by journalist Stéphane Bellec. Should you get your hands on a copy, commonIT is on page 20. Hard on the heels of the 01Informatique article I was interviewed for the 01Business show on French radio station BFM (Business FM) — 3 questions, 3 minutes. You can listen to the interview as a podcast here — skip to 42″40 (unless you’re also interested in the French market for e-learning solutions, the focus of the broadcast).

The latest release of Virtual Browser introduces several new features (like every new release — with thanks to Mathieu’s team!). One of these new features in particular adds a whole new dimension to the Virtual Browser solution. Virtual Browser now supports delivery of ICA and RDP remote desktop clients, alongside our already familiar browser support (IE, Firefox, Java, Flash, etc). With this release the end-user now has access not just to web-based applications but to any application which can be virtualised, as well as full-featured virtual desktops.

It’s worth taking a few minutes to understand where we’re going with this. Release 1.3 offers a single, secure, platform-independent client delivering installation-free end-user access to any web-based or virtualised application without the need to worry about (i) the configuration of the end-point device; (ii) the compatibility of end-point browser configuration and the target application/server; or (iii) the appropriate network configuration (VPN, etc) to access the remote application. The objective is to position the Virtual Browser solution as the universal client for access to cloud-based services.

The “Cloud” and “Cloud Computing” are still relatively new terms and there are varying definitions of what they comprise. For us, they cover the full set of web-enabled or virtualised applications, hosted in the enterprise (the private cloud) or by third-party service providers (SaaS). What we’re seeing today is enterprises migrating step-by-step to cloud computing models, with the infrastructure becoming decentralised — some of it moving to virtual environments (Citrix and others), some of it onto the Intranet, and some moving to the Internet, taking advantage of Cloud offerings vendors like Google, Salesforce.com and other SaaS providers.

In positioning Virtual Browser as the universal client for cloud access, we’re facilitating enterprise migration to cloud computing by resolving three key management issues:

1. Security: encrypted traffic between the VB client and server, strong authentication, and support for multiple isolated user environments: Internet, Enterprise (internal) applications, on-line (cloud, SaaS) services, on both enterprise (managed) end-points and non-managed end-point devices.
2. Single point of management and maintenance — configuration, updates, patching — of the client environment, on a centralised server environment, clustered for redundancy and scalability.
3. Platform independence and compatibility: No matter what type of device the end-user is using or where they connect from, the application sees the same browser, eliminating compatibility issues and facilitating application development and support.

CommonIT is growing fast. Less than a year after we opened for business, we’ve outgrown our original offices and so from today we’ve moved half a mile across Lyon to more spacious accommodation. Our new offices, at 22 Rue Constantine in Lyon’s 1st arondissement, are next door to the Museum of Fine Arts and a short walk across the Place des Terreaux from City Hall.

We’ll have space for our expanding team (currently 10 people), and the new offices also offer better facilities for meetings with customers and partners — and for our training sessions, the next of which takes place on December 17th (at the new address).

Visit the web site for full contact details.

In Sizing the Cloud; Understanding the Opportunities in Cloud Services (published in March 2009) analysts at Gartner, Inc. predict a global market for enterprise cloud services reaching $150.1 billion in 2013 – more than three times the size of today’s market of $46.4 billion. The cloud-based enterprise will be dependent on the internet to an extent way beyond the situation today, and information systems and applications will be utility services, like water or electricity — a click of the mouse to bring up the CRM software and shut it down, with the user paying for a metered service.

As far as I’m concerned this is a fantastic development which will allow businesses to focus on — well, what they do best, where they can add value. Information resources will be available on demand, like tapwater. Except that a packet of data is not like a drop of water; those data packets may be carrying business-critical data. The internet is a two-sided coin for the enterprise: one the one hand, on-demand access to flexible, massively scalable information resources ranging from basic hardware platforms to individualized services and applications software; on the other hand, the vector for increasingly intense efforts to penetrate enterprise information systems for criminal gain. In other words, the enterprise is in the process of migrating it’s information resources to the most stressful environment you can think of if you’ve ever had to think about information security.

If the Cloud Computing paradigm is to fulfill its promises, we urgently need to find ways of reducing the stress of internet dependency. We need to protect ourselves from the internet that threatens us, to get the full benefits of the internet that will make our business more agile, more responsive, which will allow us to evolve and progress. If we can’t make the internet “stress free” we’ll start seeing the (costly) development of parallel secure networks for enterprise applications.

If the best way to avoid internet attacks is not to connect to the internet, that’s clearly an unrealistic approach today. What we can do, however, is to segment different usages, isolating access to sensitive, business-critical data and applications from the potential threats. While building an entirely new network is probably a stretch too far, a more realistic solution, perfectly feasible today, is to isolate individual web applications by virtualizing access at the source, the browser itself. Enterprise end-users access sensitive business applications and data over the internet using secure tunnels carrying virtualized browser sessions. With the virtual browsers hosted in close proximity to the applications, data need never be exposed on the internet with this architecture. We can’t clean up the internet to make it entirely safe for your business critical data and applications, but by ensuring that critical systems and end-user browser sessions are protected from attack we can bring a “stress-free” internet experience several steps closer for the CIO.