AppSense is quietly becoming a big player in the enterprise tech community.  They have been profitable from the start with year after year growth.  In 2011 AppSense locked up a cool $75 million from Goldman Sachs – the second largest venture raise they’ve delivered to a company besides Facebook – to further drive global expansion while maintaining profitability.  This strong player in the virtualization space has been active in the early part of the second quarter of 2012 announcing new products and enhancements to its flagship User Virtualization Platform.

In April, the company announced a new product – DataNow – a solution that empowers users to be more productive with any type of device they have (smartphones, tablets) while easing the burden of the IT department from a security and governance perspective.  This helps IT departments with those pesky users who figure out work-arounds to access business data, while giving policy control to help internal compliance standards as well as investment protection for current infrastructure assets.  The product is in beta format and is accepting applications.

AppSense recently announced the latest version of its User Virtualization Platform.  As the central management console for extending the user experience to any combination of physical and virtual desktops, tablets and smartphones, the updated software has improved its set-up and administration, increased its management controls and given users more self-service options.  What does this mean?  IT departments can look at its infrastructure from a people-centric approach rather than a rigid “my way or the highway” policy of accessing data from corporate-approved devices.

What’s the angle?

This space is white hot.  With the advent of players like Box and DropBox as well as Microsoft and Google announcing their latest offering of cloud storage and data management services, enterprises are realizing that they need to allow users to access and manage devices the way that is easiest for them.  Ultimately, this will lead to a much greater and productive workforce.

AppSense solves the fear of working with young unproven startups.  For example there are companies that are still wary of the Box.net and DropBox model.  Not only does AppSense complement these types of technologies, but they sit on top of and work with all of the key virtualization platform players like Citrix, Microsoft and VMware.  AppSense hopes to turn virtualization into new value propositions and make it a new wave of doing business – just like VMware did.