The start of a new year is one of those moments you can both look back on the previous year and look forward to what lies ahead. Last year was very, very successful for us. We achieved triple digit growth in revenue, customers, licenses and partners! The renewal percentage of our support and upgrade protection services were almost 100%, indicating optimal customer satisfaction. Early 2011 we moved into a new office, but our team has grown so fast that we already find ourselves short of space. While our sales team is still recovering from intoxication about meeting their challenging Q4/2011 targets, we are getting on track for 2012 and are building an impressive pipeline of large, international and Fortune 500 prospects. It’s difficult to remain modest when things are going so well…

How did we do it? One of the strategic choices we made when starting Immidio was to deliver point solutions for Windows application infrastructures. These are ‘best of breed’ products – in fact small and smart building blocks – that customers can easily integrate within their IT infrastructure in order to solve their specific Windows environment challenges.

Over the past couple of years we have sold many licenses to many customers in many countries around the world. Of course we were aware that a lot of prospects were also evaluating competing profile management solutions. And even broader workspace management suites are evaluated, especially by larger prospects that have comprehensive processes in place to manage the selection of their future software solutions. Besides profile management, these broader product suites offer more functionality, like security etc. Workspace management vendors even position themselves as platform vendors and broadcast visionary strategies, all with the objective to sell product suites with a lot of functionality – in some cases even standard Microsoft functionality – at a high price.

At Immidio now the big question is whether we should step into this rat race and also start offering these kind of expensive suites as well, or stick to our original strategy. Sure, we are winning most customers due to our specific focus on relevant point solutions and our ability to swiftly translate customer requirements into functionality they really need. I admit, often driven also by the competitive offerings of other software vendors! And we are also frequently winning a new category of customers, those who have initially bought and implemented the broader workspace management suites. We are converting more and more of these prospects into customers because we live up to our promise about point solutions.

As a result I feel it’s safe to say that Immidio Flex Profiles has grown into the most complete and innovative profile management solution available in the market today. Over the past period, we received confirmation that our vision, strategy and execution are spot on. Customers like BASF, BMW, Evonik and EnBW have chosen Immidio Flex Profiles to manage their user environments. All these customers have also evaluated workspace management vendors and in some cases did PoC’s. All ended up with buying Flex Profiles.

Evolution laws of course predict it will eventually develop into a broader offering. Flex Profiles is not just a profile management solution anymore. It has grown into a mature environment management solution that offers functionality such as Predefined Settings and Advanced Process Criteria with which you are able to effectively manage your users’ environment. Actually, profile management would be too narrow to describe our offering, user environment management (UEM) is more appropriate. Immidio Flex Profiles still requires no back-end infrastructure, needs only a little training and the implementation is only a matter of hours. Next to our agility and focus, Immidio’s low pricing remains a strong selling point.

Our goal for 2012 is to continue our growth trend, have local presence in our most successful markets, keep our low pricing, continue to provide solutions that do not create a vendor lock-in and make profile management in the Immidio flavor a ‘must have’ in the UEM market space. And I guess the answer to the big question is obvious by now, we remain absolutely loyal to our original strategy!

On behalf of the whole Immidio team, I wish you a prosperous 2012!

At Immidio we aim at providing point solutions at commodity prices, because we want our products to be affordable for everyone.

Over the past two years we have noticed the need to offer our licenses not only for sale, but also provide our customers with the option to lease or rent Immidio licenses.

Together with the launch of Immidio Flex Profiles 7.5 on the 28^th of September 2011, Immidio introduces two new licensing models next to the traditional purchase agreement.

Immidio will start offering an Enterprise Agreement, where customers can purchase licenses and spread the payment over a three year period.  Next to that, Immidio will introduce the Enterprise Subscription Agreement which offers the possibility to rent the Immidio licenses for a period of three years.

With these new licensing models we drastically lower the initial investment for our products and also provide more flexibility with regard to intermediate change to another licensing model, early termination, increasing the number of licenses while benefitting from the original discount or decreasing the number of licenses without any fines. Also payment frequency will be flexible and possible by month, quarter or year.

Immidio’s products should be present in any modern Windows IT infrastructure. Adjusting our licensing model to the needs of our customers and prospects is an important step in reaching that objective.

To discuss the options for your specific situation, please contact sales@immidio.com

In 2010 Immidio evolved from a start-up company to a global enterprise software vendor. With over 350.000 licenses sold this year and acquiring over 140 customers in more than 20 countries, we can look back at 2010 as a real breakthrough. Immidio has become an important player in the Microsoft application infrastructure market, delivering point solutions that bring ROI within the first year. Immidio offers best-of-breed solutions to specific problems at commodity prices, making buying decisions a no-brainer.

We are very proud to see that several Fortune 100 companies have chosen Immidio’s products to help them migrate to Windows 7. Some of them have purchased our newest product Immidio AppScriber, an application self-provisioning environment that provides the freedom to users to activate or deactivate applications 24/7 without IT administrator intervention.

Becoming a global software vendor also brings change within the organization. Dr. Bernhard Tritsch – our highly valued and appreciated CTO – has decided to leave Immidio to make room for Rodney Medina to become Immidio’s Chief Technology Officer. Rodney has been the driving force behind turning the Flex Profiles freeware product into Immidio Flex Profiles 7 and is the inventor of Immidio AppScriber. Please join me in congratulating Rodney with his new position. I am confident that he will continue to extend Immidio’s roadmap with relevant functionality and new products.

The growth of our company also requires a larger office. Immidio will be moving office to a new location at the Burgemeester Stramanweg 101, Amsterdam – a beautiful location, easily reached by car and public transport. We will be moving to our new office on Friday, January 14, 2011.

2010 was a great year, and we are ready to meet the new demands of 2011. We are looking forward to working with you to make it a success.

The Immidio team wishes you a Happy New Year!

Two weeks ago, I walked around the CEBIT exhibition area in Hannover, Germany. I was amazed by how unclear software vendors’ messaging was within their own exhibition spaces. The bigger vendors, in particular, failed to convey their product strategy and mission.

On the last day of CEBIT, I noticed a multimillion-dollar software vendor’s booth. One of the managers was giving a speech to more than 80 employees. He thanked them for their presence and dedication, and in an attempt to add some marketing to his speech, he asked these employees to state their own tagline. It was embarrassing to see that none of the employees could answer, not even by looking around, since the tagline was not prominent in the booth. Although I felt sorry for the manager, this incident provides a clear example of the software-vendor identity crisis.

If employees cannot state what their own company does, how can anyone expect customers to understand?

In today’s business climate, product suite suppliers face difficult times in a fast-paced market with continually changing demands. Old-fashioned product suite vendors find it hard to answer when asked to explain why customers need to wait for one-and-a-half years for the next version of the software before feature requests are implemented, or why customers have to pay for functionality they will never use.

In this time of economic crisis, professionals responsible for IT operations and budgets are open to pragmatic approaches. They need IT vendors that put their money where their mouth is. Customers want point solutions that give them the functionality they need, at prices that deliver a return on investment, preferably within the first year. When customers have specific requirements, they need agile vendors who can provide immediate turnaround by turning their requests into functionality.

Traditional product suite suppliers are becoming outdated and struggle to survive. They have large development teams with lots of processes, meetings, procedures, templates and scripts just to ensure they are doing the right thing. It is in this over-organizing that they fail to understand their customers’ environments, since they are mostly busy looking inward. I have seen these kinds of software companies unable to finish the next product release due to all these well-intended hurdles. Do customers really need or want to pay for this overhead?

Compared to large vendors, agile software vendors have minimal hierarchy. Organized with responsiveness at the top of the agenda, they are in close contact with customers and partners, they provide a stimulating working environment, and they use the latest online media to communicate with their eco-system. There is no room for arrogance or politics. It is all about being proud of market knowledge and experience, being passionate about that expertise, and having a drive to share all this with the community.

Agile software companies have taken full advantage of the cloud by now. They are leading the pack by concentrating on what they do best and have implemented SaaS and cloud services for their business processes using other vendors’ best-of-breed point solutions. In addition to greater efficiency and scalability, adopting cloud services shows that these software vendors understand the latest technology and business models better. The ideal agile software vendor can use the old server room for another purpose because now there is only a router left, which connects the devices to the Internet. Interestingly enough, the use of cloud services enables all employees to access all business applications from any location.

Twenty-first century software development needs to be truly agile. Lightweight development methodologies such as XP or Scrum that heavily depend on intensive customer interaction should be used. Only when the customer experience is actively fed back into the development process will the result be fast and also very effective, thus truly agile. The twenty-first century is all about time-to-market and providing pragmatic and customer-oriented software products that solve real problems at commodity prices.

The large product suite vendors are stuck in a rat race. Investors expect quarter-by-quarter growth and therefore vendors tend to look for promising technologies to acquire. According to Heinrich Vaske, chief editor of the leading German IT magazine Computerwoche, these acquisitions are primarily driven by economic reasons but are not necessarily in the interest of customers. Once a big vendor acquires new technology, it often takes too long to integrate the new technology and often this integration is poor.

The British research firm Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) recently reported that 70% of respondents to one of their polls prefer best-of-breed solutions to create a customized IT environment in a flexible way. They willingly take the extra integration effort for granted. Customers know themselves and are smart enough to create IT environments using the point solutions that are best suited to meet their needs rather than waiting fatalistically for a product suite vendor to solve their challenges with relevant IT infrastructures.

Immidio’s strategy is to deliver these best-of-breed point solutions. We offer low-priced products that are simple to implement and provide a clear return on investment. We have no intention of combining our solutions into a product suite. We will add more point solutions over time and these will all continue to be separate products. We will keep our company lean and mean to prevent unnecessary overhead from slowing us down and to stay responsive to the real needs of IT environments. Today, our company is smaller than some of the management teams of the suite vendors with whom we compete!

Starting today, Immidio is on its own: we have acquired new investors that will fund our ambitious plans.

In October 2008, Immidio was founded as part of the Login Consultants group of companies. The first year of our existence we mainly focused on the development of our two point solutions: Immidio Flex Profiles and Immidio AppScriber.

Immediately after the release of Immidio Flex Profiles last August, we started to roll-out an international channel sales program that resulted in signing up distributors and partners in many countries around the world. In Q4/2009 our sales already hit a record of well over 100.000 licenses sold. With our second product – Immidio AppScriber – released in January, we are on track for exceeding our Q1/2010 targets as well.

Over the past period we have seen that our strategy of delivering point solutions at commodity prices is widely appreciated. We will stay away from building expensive product suites where you are forced to purchase functionality you will never use. Immidio’s products provide solutions to specific problems, therefore offering clear returns on investment. Our best of breed solutions provide the flexibility that companies prefer while shaping their IT landscape.

Now that we have become a completely independent company with strong funding and a 21st century business model, expect to see more smart solutions coming to the market, more customers choosing our agile point solutions and to hear about us more frequently.

It’s been a fascinating period the past 10 months setting up Immidio as a new software company in the virtualization market space. On the one hand Immidio is a real start-up with all the challenges that it brings, but on the other hand it’s a spin-off from a well-established expert consulting firm in application virtualization and deployment technologies. As such, we’ve inherited an installed base of more than 10.000 installations worldwide of our flagship product Immidio Flex Profiles. Moreover, we can rely on the expertise of several Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP’s) and Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP’s) within Login Consultants and expert opinions of its large customer base.

Immidio is a vendor of software products that address specific issues that arise when integrating multiple virtualization technologies into existing enterprise IT environments. We offer so-called point solutions with a clear return on investment, and will stay away from building expensive product suites where you are forced to purchase functionality you will never use.

Recently we’ve launched our first retail product, Immidio AppScriber, streamlining the distribution of applications within organizations. With Immidio AppScriber, IT departments control the applications available to end-users, while allowing end-users themselves to select the applications they need. No further IT involvement is necessary, resulting in significant savings.

Our development team is on track with Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced Edition, scheduled to be released before the summer holidays. Immidio Flex Profiles optimizes the management of user profiles in virtualization environments. It combines the advantages of mandatory profiles and scripting to achieve superior performance and flexibility. Among the new features that the Advanced Edition will bring are greatly simplified deployment, a graphical user interface (including a wizard to help create INI files), out-of-the box support for common settings, 64-bit support and compressed profile archives.

Please return to this blog on a regular basis as we will use it to share market information, trends, product news, announcements and opinions.