Ziften Announces Endpoint Quality of Service for Windows; Critical to Windows 7 Migration

August 10, 2011

Tools

Upgrading to Windows 7 Does Not Address Enterprise Endpoint QoS or Improve IT Focus on High Business-Value Activities

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Ziften Technologies, the enterprise system efficiency company, today announces comprehensive endpoint Quality of Service (QoS) for enterprise Windows 7 deployments. On the heels of the company’s launch last month, Ziften details the challenges of Windows migrations and the value of QoS for Windows 7.

Pioneering a new class of software dedicated to improving endpoint efficiency, Ziften goes beyond traditional desktop management to deliver QoS across enterprise endpoints. Until now, there has been no solution to the increasingly rampant desktop waste that drains business productivity from each employee and squanders valuable IT resources. Working with Fortune 500 customers over the past two years, Ziften’s research into improving endpoint efficiency and dynamically re-directing endpoint resources to business-critical tasks is delivering increased uptime, improved service levels, and extended machine lifespans.

The fast approaching move by many companies to Win 7 only intensifies the need for Ziften’s technologies. IT departments migrating to Win 7 on existing or new hardware will benefit dramatically from Win 7 QoS.

Windows 7 is “One-Size-Fits-All”

A ubiquitous operating system like Win 7 is designed for the broadest audience possible—consumers, small businesses, and large enterprises, all while providing backwards compatibility that may no longer be necessary. The delivery of “one-size-fits-all” functionality supersedes the needs of enterprises, business alignment and efficiency.

Operating systems do not make judgments on business value and offer no direction for managing endpoint QoS. Even Win 7 provides equal priority to a widget and to an engineering design tool. “Currently, there is anarchy on the enterprise desktop. Why would you spend so much time and resources migrating to Win 7, only to end up in the exact same position 6 to 12 months later? Enterprises face high costs to migrate and higher costs for future support, only to have users complaining once again. This doesn’t make sense,” says Todd Smith, Tivoli founder, systems management expert, and a Ziften advisor. Without an additional layer of behavioral intelligence, upgrading to Win 7 does not fully meet enterprise needs.

Increasing System Demands

Win 7 demands a faster processor, more memory, and better graphics to do the same job XP did with much less—it places your enterprise in a higher “OS tax bracket,” leaving reduced resources for important business applications. Whether deploying to new or existing hardware, this higher OS tax bracket makes reducing process competition and directing available resources to business-critical applications even more critical. Win 7’s move away from an NT-based kernel requires the additional consumption layer of XP Mode to run the business-critical apps that are key for business continuity—especially during the initial enterprise-wide deployment.

Ziften uses behavioral technology to detect and correct waste on enterprise endpoints. Even when starting with a fresh Win 7 image, Ziften consistently identifies efficiency improvements that free valuable system resources. Newly available resources can be directed toward business-critical applications.

Ignoring Endpoint QoS has a Steep Cost

The real measure of a successful Win 7 migration is future problem avoidance and reducing the total cost of ownership. Even with a hardware refresh and a system re-image, there is scant breathing space before end-user problems and IT support costs again spiral. Recurring costs far exceed one-time migration expenses.

“Full IT optimization cannot be achieved without Ziften’s focus on endpoint efficiency. Providing QoS at the endpoint is vital to maximizing the return on corporate IT investment. Ziften has made incredible progress towards achieving this goal,” says Smith. The goal for enterprise IT managers needs to be delivery of the best level of service—managed endpoint QoS—to their customers, the end users.

With a unique combination of enterprise security and systems management knowledge, Ziften’s team delivers enterprise endpoint efficiency not previously available. The era of true QoS on the endpoint is finally upon us. Details about the product, which is already being used by early adopter Fortune 500 customers, will be announced in the near future.

About Ziften

Austin-based Ziften Technologies is pioneering a breakthrough class of enterprise software that empowers organizations to better understand and control applications running across their Windows desktop environment and to automatically eliminate, restrict, or accelerate them based on relative business value. With extensive experience deploying behavioral software to more than 150 million systems worldwide, Ziften has unrivaled understanding of Windows process behavior and application performance. We bring this unique expertise in behavioral classification and machine learning from the security and hardware realms to the even more tangible and problematic area of Enterprise System Efficiency. Our experts hail from technology’s most regarded brands: Akamai, AMD, Caltech, Cisco, Dell, Intel, and Symantec (and its acquisition of WholeSecurity). Ziften is backed by Fayez Sarofim & Co. and Trellis Partners, and boasts advisory board members including the founder of Tivoli, the founder of iChat, and the former President & COO of Waste Management. More on Ziften can be found at www.ziften.com. Ziften. Run at Peak.