VMware vCloud Blog: Another VMware Cloud: AppSense Runs Its Public Cloud on VMware

Why should you move to the cloud with VMware and one of our vCloud Service Providers? As Abdul Hummaida, Development Project Lead at AppSense, shares, "From a development perspective, if someone comes to me to request hardware my first question to them is, 'Why would you need to buy hardware rather than use the iland cloud?'"

AppSense, headquartered in the United Kingdom and with offices around the world, focuses on the creation of complete user virtualization – giving users the ability to seamlessly transition between electronic devices and the flexibility to work in any way they want. With a growth rate of more than 30% year-on-year, the demand for AppSense's software has meant an increased need for faster development and testing.

AppSense needed to address two major challenges:

Scalability Testing – AppSense needed to be able to execute massive and aggressive scalability testing, which required an infrastructure capable of mimicking its enterprise clients' environments of hundreds of thousands of people. To ensure such scalability would mean continually purchasing large amounts of hardware.
Performance – AppSense engineers needed to test, tune and optimize the company's software products by working with different versions very quickly and ideally in parallel. Even though the company has testing labs with traditional hardware, AppSense didn't want to have to spend 4-5x more capital expenditure and needed a way to run multiple versions of its software products in parallel.

Abdul decided that the best option for the company was to find a cloud-based solution that would meet the company's objectives in a cost-effective and timely manner. AppSense eventually decided to work with iland, because as Abdul states, "iland was the only vendor that allowed us to run desktop operating systems such as Windows XP, Windows 7, etc. Our software products are deployed on both server operating systems and desktop operating systems and so it was important to us that our prospective cloud vendor and partner should be capable of meeting those requirements."

By working with iland, AppSense has been able to achieve the following benefits:

Scalability testing – enabling hundreds of VMs to be spun up to represent a customer's environment and allow for aggressive software testing in that environment;
Performance – with iland's cloud infrastructure, engineers are able to spin up environments rapidly on-demand vs. the weeks it previously took to purchase and set up new hardware.
Cost savings – by not having to buy large amounts of hardware to develop and test its software products, AppSense's IT department has been able to change its financial model into a case of zero CAPEX vs. healthy OPEX.

With the speed and agility the iland cloud offers, AppSense is able to bring its software products to market quicker, contributing to the company's bottom line much faster than the traditional hardware environment ever could.

Furthermore, Abdul shares, "We were impressed with the honest and upfront interaction and willingness of the iland team to understand the issues that were specific to our business. We were delighted with the quick access we had to iland's technical individuals and their proactive approach to working with us on developing our cloud platform."

What's next for AppSense? As the company introduces more enterprise software products, the team plans on leveraging the iland cloud platform to meet increased demand instead of buying more hardware. Additionally, as more team members adopt the cloud for the flexibility, agility and speed of deployment it offers, it shows that the cloud is quickly becoming the infrastructure platform of choice for the company.

Check out the case study to learn more, and be sure to stay tuned for even more Another VMware Cloud customer stories! Visit We Speak Cloud to learn more about the success of these customers, and follow @vCloud and @VMwareSP on Twitter for future updates.

Original Page: http://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/?p=2237

Sent from my iPhone