They say time moves fast and the world is in a constant state of change. Well, the last 12 months have certainly shown that. America has a new leader; the UK is dealing with Brexit, and Wales made it into the 2016 UEFA European Soccer Championship semi-finals.

Work, too, has been busy. When reflecting my time at Ivanti since the company—then LANDESK—acquired AppSense in April 2016, I realize that there have been some big changes. But any software industry veteran will tell you two things about our market:  for software, the only constant is change, and that, when the organization’s priorities are right, change drives progress.

At a corporate level in January 2017, Clearlake Capital acquired LANDESK, and merged it with HEAT to form Ivanti; this strengthened our position in the ITSM space and more recently strengthened out standing in the ITSM Gartner quandrant.  In April 2017, Ivanti acquired Concorde Systems, further enhacing our ITAM and Software asset management capabilities; and in July 2017, Ivanti acquired RES, bringing another 2K customers who believe in both automation and user workspace management.

Under this new name, it’s easy to think that AppSense and/or RES have been consumed by the larger organization, but as the Unified Endpoint Management market continues to gather pace, we believe that User Workspace Management plays a critical part in how we continue to manage our users and desktop estates.

Other than renaming DesktopNow to User Workspace Manager (UWM), here are a few other changes you may have missed…

  • Investment in product:
    • Ivanti is investing more dollars, resources, and time in product development than AppSense was able to do as a small company. The result? An awesome roadmap that’s delivering new and improved features that will enable our customers to:
      • Easily migrate to Windows 10 without disrupting users’ workday
      • Accommodate Windows as a Service by separating out the management of the user settings and their data.
      • Adopt Office 365 without throwing the user experience under the bus
      • Accelerate and enable the move to Citrix Cloud and workload in the cloud
      • Leverage OneDrive storage without compromising on policy or control
    • We’ve also leveraged the broader Ivanti product portfolio to benefit our customers. With Xtraction, which is included for free with User Workspace Manager, we provide customizable dashboards that provide insight into UWM databases we’ve not been able to deliver until now. In addition, by coupling technology like Application Control with Lumension Device Control and Shavlik Patch, we now offer the most comprehensive preventative set of endpoint security technologies to deal with today’s ever-increasing security threats.
    • An existing Ivanti initiative we’ve adopted thanks to more resource availability is production testing at customer sites, improving release quality to benefit all our customers.
    • Ivanti’s most recent acquisition of RES Software bolsters the UWM portfolio, giving our customers more choices to solve their user workspace challenges, and provides Ivanti with slick workflow and automation capabilities for user self-service and delegated IT that Ivanti will deliver as part of existing offerings.
  • Investment in people: 
    • The vast majority of the Development and Product Management teams are intact and we have added new members. They are busy cranking out great products using the aforesaid awesome roadmap.
    • Thanks to new Development resources, we’ve been able to extend product localization and other features far beyond what we could have done at AppSense.
  • Investment in channel: Ivanti understood the strategic and practical importance of strong, responsive channel support for the AppSense products, and has backed the channel accordingly.

Well, that’s enough looking back for now. Join me in looking forward to seeing the results from the investments we’ve recently made for hosting UWM in the cloud, support of InTune-managed desktops, and Citrix migration enablement, plus new functionality like GeoSyc, VHD/Office OST, and support for non-domain-joined machines.

If you haven’t already checked out the Ivanti Community pages, please do! There you can raise and track feature requests through our new User Voice portal, contribute and learn from the community, and take part in our Early Access program.