ReadWriteWeb

If you need remote access to your desktop from your iOS phone or tablet, now you can get there for free. Starting today, LogMeIn has a new app in the Apple App Store and it is free. This replaces their low-end Ignition app that they previously charged $30 for. It doesn't give you everything that the current paid app provides, such as file management and cloud storage and HD video/audio streaming. But if you just need remote access, then the free app will do quite nicely. You of course need to run the free version (or the paid version) of LogMeIn on your Windows or Mac desktop, and set up an account online with them to complete the connection.

What I like about LogMeIn is how they are upstanding guys. If you put down your money in the past for Ignition, you will be grandfathered in and have the premium features forever. They are planning on an Android app next year, naturally. The Pro version is $40 a year.

Embedding streaming video methods in hardware is not particularly new, but Citrix' latest spin on the concept may change not only the buildouts but the price points for tablet PCs as soon as next year. Citrix is one of the key competitors in the virtual desktop market, streaming the video and audio from operating systems run in the cloud to all types of clients, including Android tablets, iPads, and iPhones.

But Citrix also owns the codecs it uses for streaming multimedia to XenDesktop and Citrix Receiver clients at high speed over bandwidth-challenged connections. We've talked about it here on RWW not two weeks ago: It's called HDX, and up until now, the one key benefit that standardized codecs such as H.264 had over HDX was that manufacturers could get H.264 in hardware.

In the past few years, one of the game-changing technologies that has helped Dell claw its way back to competitiveness against HP in the server arena is automated deployment tools. These let admins remotely install software on hundreds of clients in minutes. But consider this: If applications like Microsoft Office could be run on remote servers and streamed remotely to thinner clients, even to tablets like Apple's iPad, without installing it to those clients in the first place, why bother with automated deployment at all?

The answer to that question has typically centered around performance. Imagine an application that stutters like Max Headroom running on your state-of-the-art quad-core PC. Yesterday, Cisco blew a hole in that argument, announcing a network optimization service specifically designed for Citrix XenDesktop, the system that powers the revolutionary Citrix Receiver that makes Office run on the iPad.

Just three short weeks ago, a relatively new player in the CRM space, Assistly, made its biggest debut at the Dreamforce conference by integrating its social CRM service with Salesforce.com. The result was the beginning of a cloud-based customer service portal that lets Salesforce users initiate direct contact with customers, aided by Assistly's innovative "agents."

Days later, Microsoft unveiled an addition to its Dynamics AX 2012 product that should have surprised no one: a feature that gives salespeople direct insight into customers' Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn activity, using Outlook as the portal. Today, Salesforce has countered that move by purchasing Assistly outright for $50 million in cash.

The OpenStack Project is moving a bit closer to its proprietary competition with the Diablo release, out today. In addition to improving the three core projects, OpenStack is now adding a Web-based dashboard, unified authentication and an API for configuring virtual networks. With Diablo, OpenStack is poised to manage global clouds.

The OpenStack Project has made impressive gains since its inception just a little more than a year ago. OpenStack has gone from a joint project between RackSpace and NASA to a massive effort spanning 110 companies and organizations.

Cloud and virtualization company Citrix is releasing its popular GoToMeeting application for Android devices. Citrix cites stats from The Telework Coalition that 58% of companies consider themselves a virtual workplace while 67% of all workers use mobile and wireless computing devices. Combined with the fact that Android controls more than 40% of current smartphone market share, GoToMeeting is long overdue for a release on Google's mobile operating system.

GoToMeeting is going to be preloaded onto Motorola's newest Android device, the Droid BIONIC, starting Sept. 8. The iOS version of GoToMeeting has been downloaded nearly 250,000 times. Motorola will also be pre-loading the Citrix Receiver that allows employees to access corporate Windows apps and documents from anywhere.

No one denies any more the fact that Salesforce.com has become a platform. Some would go so far as to call it an ecosystem, but it may yet need to prove its mettle in that category. At issue: Can three established services in the same market carve out competitive presences for each other inside the Salesforce platform?

On one side of the arena is Citrix, an established brand with about $11.4 billion in market capitalization (Salesforce itself is already at $17.1 billion), and whose GoToAssist brand is already one of the world's most recognized. On another side is Assistly, which is based on an innovative system of automated "agents" that communicate with customers on a regular basis. And in the third corner is Angel Contact Center, which integrates call center support with business intelligence functions.

Citrix is moving fast since acquiring Cloud.com in July. After less than two months with Cloud.com, Citrix has decided to bet heavy on the open cloud by merging all code into the open source release of CloudStack.

CloudStack is similar to Amazon EC2, but it allows organizations to run a private cloud rather than depending on managed software from a provider. But CloudStack has a number of important differences between EC2 and other proprietary solutions like VMware vSphere.

The cloud looks less cloudy by the week. This week's story line for the VMworld 2011 conference in Las Vegas, which opens today, appears to be "cloud definition." One of this week's most defining moments may have already happened, as Citrix Systems made good on its pledge last month, in acquiring cloud infrastructure firm Cloud.com, to extend its CloudStack infrastructure platform to a broader array of customers.

This morning, now that Cloud.com has completely been absorbed into Citrix, the cloud infrastructure project is announcing it is completely folding its commercial tier into the open source community. This makes CloudStack officially 100% FOSS. What's more, the latest version will add support for Oracle VM hypervisors, in addition to its existing support for VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer. Preview release 2.2.11 is available now (warning: it cannot be used to upgrade GA installations).

Wasting absolutely no time since its takeover of virtual disk technology maker RingCube just two weeks ago, Citrix today released its latest 5.5 version of XenDesktop with RingCube support built-in. The latest edition enables RingCube's radical new configuration for virtual desktop deployment: a system where all the users' operating system and application images are maintained in single volumes, with only their personal documents stored separately.

There's no logical reason any more why a virtual desktop deployment must mirror a physical hard drive, with multitudes of near-identical copies of Windows and Linux and Mac OS congesting storage networks and consuming bandwidth. With the RingCube model, everyone who chooses the same operating system runs off the same image.