Landesk Extends Endpoint Reach via AppSense Deal

One thing that IT services providers now struggle with is the diversity of desktops that now routinely get deployed by IT organizations. Not only are there now multiple flavors of Windows, Apple and Google Android devices, there are also a large number of virtual desktops.

In anticipation of the fact that virtual desktops will become a more popular way to cope with all the diversity on the desktop, Landesk announced plans to acquire AppSense.

As a provider of both tools for securing and unifying the management of endpoints, AppSense software has been most widely deployed in IT environments that have adopted desktop virtualization. Landesk CEO Steve Daly said acquiring AppSense will help the company address IT management challenges by enabling organizations to manage end users more holistically and will bring with it additional application white-listing capabilities that Landesk will use to extend its portfolios.

For now, that primary focus will be on bundling AppSense and Landesk offerings in ways that will make them simpler to acquire, Daly said. Longer term, Landesk will determine where additional synergies might be from a product development perspective.

Given the number of the larger “celestial bodies” with which Landesk competes, it’s critical for the company to be able to provide partners with a comprehensive approach to managing endpoints, Daly said.

These days, IT organizations are asking solution providers for ways to unify the management of those endpoints based on the number of devices being employed by a specific end user. In many cases, that winds up being a Windows or Apple Macintosh PC used in combination with a tablet and a smartphone.

Of course, there are days when solution providers may miss the comparative simplicity of a world where all the desktops ran some flavor of Windows. As end users get more comfortable with navigating multiple classes of devices, the complexity associated with managing the IT environment has increased substantially.

The good news—for the channel, at least—is that it’s not usually long before all that complexity winds up pushing internal IT organizations to look for some extra external help to make sense of it all.

Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for more than 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.