Like my six-year-old daughter, I learn new words every day. Yesterday, she learned inequity. Today, I learned cloudpaging, a technology promoted by Numescent.
Venture capitalists apparently already know the meaning and import of cloudpaging, and this week dumped an additional $13.6 million into Numescent.
Cloudpaging is a new form of virtualization, really a form of application virtualization. It takes existing packaged apps and, like other forms of application virtualization, turns them into a service. In this case, the application can be streamed from the cloud.
To offer proper performance for large or ‘chatty’ applications, Numescent installs some bits of the software onto the client, a bit like caching.
The technology absolutely reminds this writer of Softricity, which was acquired by Microsoft, but was far more directed at on-premises use where apps are streamed from an in-house server.
In fact, Numescent owns Endeavors Technologies, which claims to have invented application virtualization 14 years ago.
Softricity, meanwhile, was founded in 2001, just 12 years ago.
Cash and Cloud Combo
The new cash infusion was driven by T-Venture.
“Numecent has a potentially game-changing new technology with a huge ‘wow’ factor,” said Dr. Aleksandar Mitrovic, senior vice president for Deutsche Telekom's Product & Innovation division. “As Telcos around the world evolve to become cloud services providers for consumers, SMBs and enterprises alike, disruptive technologies such as Numecent's cloudpaging will offer unique differentiation opportunities and compelling benefits for our users.”
Right now, Numescent is aimed at turning Windows applications into services, and at the same time blending the best of mature packaged software and the Internet. “This allows native applications to behave like Web-apps while still maintaining the full feature set, inter-application compatibility and performance of locally-installed software – the apps can even run offline. Cloudpaging is a Web-scale technology which can scale to millions of users with minimal server and network footprint,” the company explained.
Numescent was co-founded by Osman Kent, who sold his previous company 3Dlabs for $170 million just over a decade ago to Creative Labs. Kent apparently found out about Endeavors and its application virtualization technology, quickly swallowed it up, and rebranded as Numescent.
Kent has big plans. “With this fresh injection of capital into the company, we plan to make cloudpaging pervasive and woven into the fabric of ISV, Telco and MSP clouds,” said Osman Kent , co-founder and CEO of Numecent. “The way users interact with and use native applications has hardly changed since downloads and software installations were inflicted on users decades ago. We believe cloudpaging is poised to change that for the better as the industry embraces friction-free and on-demand delivery models.”
Meanwhile, the extra dough will help Numescent move beyond Windows, and cloudify Linux and Android apps as well.
Also this May, Gartner named Numecent a “Cool Vendor in Client Computing.”
Numescent, though it sounds similar to other application virtualization and application delivery tools, sees itself as far different.
“Unlike expensive remoting solutions which cannot scale, cloudpaging does not push pixels from the Cloud – the technology actually transmits pre-virtualized native software instructions (a page at a time and on demand) which are then executed on the user's machine in a transient manner and at full performance. As a result, cloudpaged native applications can reduce network usage by up to 95 percent and can become Web-scale with minimal server footprint,” the company said, claiming its apps are up to 100 times faster than this downloaded in linear fashion.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
