NEW AND DIFFERENT
It's been a while since a startup focused on enterprise software has made me do a double-take. Most of the startups in recent years have been more focused on consumer market innovations, with enterprise applications seemingly taking a back-seat.
The company in question is MokaFive, a silicon valley startup with a solid pedigree of founders and investors. This New York Times piece offers a good summary:
"MokaFive’s angel investors and board members include Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist, and Bill Raduchel, former chief technology officer of AOL Time Warner and former chief strategy officer of Sun Microsystems.
The MokaFive team is trying to bring the benefits of virtualization to desktops and laptops — security, energy efficiency, flexibility and less need for technical support. Several corporations have been sampling MokaFive’s technology for months in pilot projects. But the Silicon Valley company is announcing on Monday that its software will be commercially available in June.
The company is first marketing its software to corporations to help them improve security and reduce technical support costs on their desktop PC’s. But the larger vision, according to the MokaFive Web site, is to offer users “freedom from hardware, freedom from spyware, freedom to carry your computing environment as you wish and the freedom to choose the operating system, application and content that is right for you.”
The MokaFive offerings include management tools for network administrators and portable LivePC virtual machine software that a user can carry around on a USB thumb drive, iPod or cellphone. “The long-term vision is to have service providers maintain this for consumers,” explained Bill Demas, chief executive of MokaFive."
For a better sense of how the company's initial services may disrupt the enterprise computing market, take a look at this demo video on the home page. It shows how virtualization software, is being taken to the next level as a service, by this startup and I suspect others.
One can also imagine how consumer-focused companies like Google and others might make this approach available to consumers as a logical step in the evolution of "cloud" computing.
For now, MokaFive is definitely a one to watch.
Comments