Numecent and Software2 Deliver Big In Education - 40 Universities Now Serving 10,000 Cloudpaged Apps to 250,000 Students

IRVINE, Calif., Oct. 15, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Cloudpaging pioneer Numecent® and Software2™ today unveiled their higher-education partnership and are disclosing how the two companies have delivered more than 9-million cloudpaged application sessions to date, at 40 Universities across the UK.

This ground-breaking deployment serves approximately 10,000 heavy-weight cloudified applications, delivered to more than 250,000 students and staff, including a rapidly growing number of BYOD users.

Software2 specializes in deploying Numecent's Application Jukebox® Suite in educational establishments and has built a thriving community of users and technical specialists who understand the needs of the education sector. Having established a substantial following in the UK, Software2 is now expanding its operations into the US and will be attending the Educause Annual Conference held at Anaheim, CA between October 15-18.

"It's all about providing a contemporary and empowering education for students while providing them with the tools they need to achieve their objectives," said Osman Kent, co-founder and CEO of Numecent.  "For this reason, we see Universities as a very strategic market for Numecent – validating the large-scale enterprise benefits of our cloudpaging platform. With ever-shrinking IT budgets and a transient yet growing user population, Universities have to maximize their IT productivity while providing competitive and educational value add to their users. Our cloudpaging offerings, together with Software2's razor-sharp community focus, provide just that - substantial savings in IT costs while offering the students and staff the best 24/7 access to the applications they need which are essential components of receiving their degree."

"This joint achievement is a seeming paradox and an industry milestone for the education sector – it shows how you can provide a vastly improved computing experience for students while substantially reducing the IT costs a the same time," said Tony Austwick, co-founder and COO of Software2. "Now that we have shown repeatable success in helping Universities achieve these objectives with more than a quarter of a million users already under our belt, we are now expanding our worldwide presence. We plan to take this valuable know-how and Numecent's unique cloudpaging technology to even larger student populations around the world."

Built on its award-winning cloudpaging platform, Numecent's  Jukebox suite of products enable friction-free and super-scalable deployment of any Microsoft® Windows® application virtualized, on-demand and IT-free from the cloud or on-premises. This provides cost savings of orders of magnitude compared to legacy models of application provisioning. Also, with its integrated real-time software license enforcement and audit features, Jukebox enables enterprises to remain compliant with complex licensing requirements and even provide private Software-as-a-Service offerings to their users for their native Windows applications.

Selected Testimonials From Universities

Kingston University - "We chose Numecent's Application Jukebox platform after an extensive evaluation of other offerings, during which we discovered that legacy solutions could often handle only 20% of the applications we needed to deploy. Not only was Jukebox the preferred option in solving almost 100 % of our deployment issues, the close relationship which ensued between the parties enabled us to influence product roadmaps, thereby ensuring a continued fit for our needs," said Michael Phillips, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing at Kingston University. "With Jukebox, we've been able to significantly improve deployment times, realized a reduction of imaging times from 12+hours to 45 minutes  and because of the agility it provides, we were able to reduce the number of dedicated lab computers, with corresponding savings in IT support and deployment costs. All this whilst at the same time making available 'specialist software' previously only available in specific areas, on all University PCs for our students, hence increasing availability to 24/7."

Oxford Brookes - "Oxford Brookes University delivers an outstanding student experience which includes high-quality access to IT services anytime and anywhere. We are in the final months of developing a $200M new campus learning space and it is vital that our IT matches these high standards. Numecent's Application Jukebox allows our students to access the latest versions of their applications from any campus, providing unrivalled agility and flexibility in where they choose to study. It also ensures new applications can be quickly provisioned, enabling a responsive approach to new teaching innovations," said Bill Sturman, CIO of Oxford Brookes University.

University of Surrey - "At University of Surrey, software deployment and management was a big problem for us. Applications provisioned using legacy techniques meant very long build times with software bloat and configurations slowing down the performance of machines over time, resulting in high IT support costs," said Roger Strickland, IT Director. "With the help of Software2, we have successfully implemented Numecent's Application Jukebox to deliver virtualized applications to both campus managed desktops and BYOD PCs owned by students and staff through a self-service portal. This enabled us to provide a greatly-enhanced user experience while allowing us to streamline the software lifecycle process by removing duplicate efforts across the campus and by providing us a real-time understanding of our software estate."

About Software2

Software2 (www.software2.us.com) is an innovative solutions company specializing in solving the software deployment challenges faced by the University sector. Through its value added offerings based on Numecent's Application Jukebox cloudpaging platform, the company rapidly established a base of 40 Universities in the UK and is now expanding its operations in the rest of the EU and the US. The list of Universities serviced by Software2 includes;

Oxford Brookes University
Imperial College London
Kingston University
University of Surrey
Royal National College for the Blind
London South Bank University
Nottingham Trent University
.....and many more

With its razor sharp focus on the education sector and fanatical dedication to user support, Software2 aims to become the world's leading provider of application deployment solutions for this sector. (Twitter @software2ltd)

About Numecent

Numecent (www.numecent.com) is a pioneer and technology leader in rapid, secure and friction-free provisioning of native applications from the Cloud (public, private or on-premises) through virtualization. The company's groundbreaking and patented cloudpaging platform can deliver a native application between 20x to 100x faster than a linear digital download and execute on the client platform without installation and without essentially any IT support.

Unlike expensive remoting solutions that cannot scale, cloudpaging does not push pixels. The technology actually transmits pre-virtualized native software instructions (a page at a time and on demand). These 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% and can become Web-scale with minimal server footprint.

Numecent was recently named a Gartner "Cool Vendor 2013" in recognition of its disruptive technology and, in a recent survey, ranked #11 in Cloud Thought Leadership alongside industry giants. In June 2013, the company announced the completion of a new $13.6M round of funding led by T-Venture, the VC arm of Deutsche Telekom. A B2B company, Numecent's primary customers are Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Telcos and Educational and Corporate Enterprises.

Follow us on Twitter (@numecent, #numecent, #cloudpaging) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/numecent)

We are always looking for exceptional people who have a passion to make a difference. For career opportunities at Numecent see www.numecent.com/careers.html  

All trademarks and registered trademarks previously cited are hereby recognized as the property of their respective owners

SOURCE Numecent