Monday, November 17, 2008

Virtual Computer board welcomes Mzinga CEO Faulk

By Galen Moore

Mzinga Inc. CEO Rick Faulk will join the board of directors at Virtual Computer Inc., the Westford desktop virtualization company is expected to announce today.

Virtual Computer emerged from stealth mode in September. Until then, it had been known as Old Road Computing. The stealth-mode company had raised a $6 million Series A round from seven investors, including Lexington-based Highland Capital Partners and Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners, Mass High Tech reported in January.

In addition to Faulk, the Virtual Computer board comprises company CEO Dan McCall, CTO Alex Vasilevsky, Flybridge general partner Jon Karlen, and Highland general partner Peter Bell.

The company is about to go into beta mode with its NxTop product, which virtualizes PC desktops and allows company IT departments to manage them centrally. The product is expected to ship in the first quarter of 2009 and will cut customers’ PC management costs by 300 percent, Vasilevsky said.

“A well-managed PC costs a company $438 (a year),” he said. “We’ll be $108 to $110.”

In an interview Friday, Faulk said Virtual Computer will bring to the PC the efficiencies that virtualization — the ability to deal with virtual instances of servers - has already brought to the enterprise data center. “If you solve a difficult problem, you’re going to win,” said Faulk, a former marketing executive at Cisco Systems Inc. and Lotus Development Corp. “It’s the ability to manage thousands of companies as easily as you can manage one.”

“Virtual Computer is a perfect case study of what we do,” said Flybridge’s Karlen. “Enterprise IT is getting harder and harder to sell against the big guys. We think that it needs a real disruption to create opportunities for start-ups. Virtualization is a real disruptive technology.”