Learn more about our all-new Packaging Services, and how we can help you accelerate the deployment process of your Cloudpaging applications.

In this webinar, Director of Client Services Phil Morgan and Account Management Director Phil Spitze explain what the AppsAnywhere Packaging Service is all about, including details of the subscriptions, the apps included, how it all works, and how you can get started.

Learn more about our Packaging Service

Find out more about the AppsAnywhere Packaging Service, including how it works, details of the subscriptions, and pricing information, by visting the links below, where you can also browse our Packaging Menu.

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Packaging Service webinar transcription

Hello everybody and welcome. Before we get started, just a couple of points of order. This webinar is being recorded and a sharing link will be distributed once the processing of the video has been completed. Also, we will be taking questions at the end, so please use the Q&A panel to submit any that you might have as we go along.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. My name is Phil Spitze and I'm the Account Management Director for North America. My goal here, at AppsAnywhere, is to ensure that your customers are satisfied and successful with your use of AppsAnywhere. Included with most AppsAnywhere deployment is the Cloudpaging virtualization technology where the creation of software packages and deployment takes place.

Today, we have a very exciting new service to announce that will help everyone jumpstart, maintain, or simply offload some of that effort around creating packages with Cloudpaging. That new service is our packaging subscription service and joining me to take you through the ins and outs, or bits and bobs, as he might say, is Phil Morgan from our UK office.

Phil is our Director of Client Services and the designer of this awesome new service. Without further delay, UK Phil, I will turn it over to you.

Great. Thanks very much Phil. So, hello everyone, thank you for joining us for today's webinar. I'm Phil Moore again, I'm Director Of Client Services here at AppsAnywhere in the UK. Today, I'm here to tell you about our new packaging service for 2019. Now, as I'm sure you all know, here at AppsAnywhere we use a variety of different delivery methods to deliver any app to any device. Our recommended method for delivering Windows apps to Windows devices is Cloudpaging from Numecent.

Cloudpaging allows us to virtualize any Windows app. The way that we do that is through packaging using Cloudpaging Studio which is included at no extra cost with all deployments. So, many of you will be familiar with Cloudpaging Studio and actually many of you may be experienced in packaging with Cloudpaging as well, but some of you will not. There are various ways that we can help you with your packaging, so first of all we have the AppsAnywhere library of recipes, all of the packaging instructions and recipes that we write up and share with everyone. We also offer training and certification and how to use Cloudpaging Studio. Last, but not least, if you want us to do just do it for you we offer packaging services too.

Packaging services have been an extremely popular have been extremely popular over the last couple of years, and we first started providing this service back in 2016. Actually, our team have pretty much been fully booked every year. We've been working at universities all across North America, the UK, and across Europe, and we've been growing our team over that time, so that we could provide this service for more and more of you, create more recipes and deliver more training.

If we have a look at AppsAnywhere library nowadays we now have over 400 recipes in the library, and actually as well in the training that we've delivered there are now over 100 certified packaging associates, so that's IT professionals across all of our customers who can take a Windows application and convert it into a virtual app for delivery with Cloudpaging.

Now, as I said, we also offer that service at AppsAnywhere. Last year, in particular, was a real busy year for us. We delivered more packaging than ever before, 350 days of packaging last year, and in that time we ... and we actually packaged up 500 applications. Now, 500 might not seem like very many for that number of days, but that is really because you all tend to give us your most difficult apps. That's fair enough and, obviously, we're very happy to do those, but lots and lots of packaging took place last year. We also updated 230 recipes last year as well as a result of that work.

Now, this is great and we're really pleased to be able to help so many of you with packaging, but we want to do more. We want to more apps, we want to do more packaging, so this year we took a step back, and we thought how do we improve access to the service? There were times last year when we were fully booked, and it was difficult to fit things in, so we want to widen out the service to more of you, so more people can benefit. We want to reduce the costs, and do this more efficiently, but ultimately the most important thing is we want to save you time. So, we decided we would change our approach and so, for us, 2019 is the year of the packaging revolution. We're going to do things differently, and we're going to do things better.

The first thing that we thought is there are lots and lots of free and open source apps that are in use all across the universities and colleges that we're working with, and so we thought well, why can't we just packaged those and keep them up-to-date, and so that you guys just don't need to package those of ever again? So, that's what we're going to do. We're going to introduce a core service. We found 30 free and open source apps that are very commonly used, and we'll be packaging up those and keeping them up-to-date every 3 to 6 months.

If we've got to not all of the apps on the list that you use then, we give you another 10 requests, so you can choose another 10 free open source apps and will also package those up for you as well. Of course, any free open source software that we package we'll share with all customers. So, what we're really hoping to do here is build up the library, not 30 or 40, but perhaps 60, 70, or even 100 or more free and open source apps that are up-to-date, that you never need to package again, and you can just download. Our operation is expanding in Europe nowadays, we'll be doing these both in English and German languages and, hopefully, other languages to follow too. It really doesn't make sense that everybody needs to package free open source software, so we want to do that for you and, hopefully, at a price point that makes it a real easy decision. We'll tell you a little bit more about the pricing and how that works towards the end of this webinar.

It's not just about free and open source software. Many licensed apps are also very widely used and I suspect lots of you will recognize these apps, for example. We've noticed over the past few years that lots of our customers are requesting the same apps, and when we talk to CIOs this is a real point of frustration. If everybody's using the same apps why do we all have to package them separately? We, certainly, share that frustration at AppsAnywhere and we think surely there is a better way. All of these applications, for example, can be packaged, and the license key can be added or changed later, so it should be the case that we can package these applications and that we can share the benefit of the time-saving with everybody. Once these apps are packaged we can add in your license key and provide you with a ready-to-use app set in far less time than it would normally take, so that's what we're hoping to do in 2019.

We're going to provide a new service and what we've come up with is a menu of over 60 applications, all popular apps where we can take this approach. The apps are banded, so the pricing is in bands A, B, and C. A being the simplest apps and C being the most complex. So, rather than charging you a full data package an app we can take your license key, add it to our existing package and produce a new app in a fraction of the time. That means that we can really drive down the cost here. The real goal is to pass on these economies of scale. This will be an on-demand service, so you can request apps as and when you need them. Of course, we'll have an SLA for delivery and that will be between one and four weeks.

Now, obviously, if everybody submits all of your packaging requests in August we're going to have a lot of demand, and as we traditionally work with a lot of universities and colleges, that is often the case. So, we'll be offering an incentive by the way of a 25% off-peak discount, if you're able to submit your request outside of the peak summer months. For example, under this new model, to have SPS packaged in June will now be four times cheaper than it was last year. As the service grows will be looking to pass on even more savings.

Now, as I said, our approach is to offer a menu of popular apps at lower prices because we can pre-prepare these applications, but we can also package any apps that are not on our menu, in which case we'll provide a price on application. A pun was intended there. So, you can choose from the menu or you can choose off-menu. Pricing will be available in credits and you can top up credits as and when you need them.

Now, we also saw a real opportunity this year to help you all with an application suite that can be a little bit tricky at times, and that is Adobe Creative Cloud 2019. Now, probably many of you are aware that Adobe have a new licensing model available this year called Named User Licensing. Now, that's actually quite a benefit, from a packaging point of view, because with the Named User Licensing when users launch an app such as Dreamweaver or Photoshop they need to sign in using their Adobe ID, and what that means is that license details don't need to be embedded into every one of the apps, and so we can package the Adobe Creative Cloud apps, and actually reuse the same packages for many of you with only slight changes needed. So, we're going to provide a specially discounted bundle with 18 of the Adobe Creative Cloud apps included, ready, packaged, and all that your end-users will need to do is sign in with their Adobe ID.

Now, we know that we're going to need to keep some of these apps up to date, and what we're going to do is provide updates both in January and August, so our team have already packaged the whole suite, 18 apps that are ready to go, and we created those in January and we'll be updating them again in August, so that they can be available for everybody who subscribes to the new service.

So, let's move on. I'll show you a little demo of what this looks like. Now, we thought about how best present this service to everybody and, of course, we make an app store here at AppsAnywhere, so the logical choice would to be to use AppsAnywhere, and that's exactly what we've done, and so here it is.

This is the new AppsAnywhere packaging portal. You can see here the available apps that we can package for you, and if I just scroll down the list for a second you can just have a love a look and see everything that's available here. I will share some details with you at the end of this webinar, so if you want to login here and actually have a look for yourselves, you'll be able to look through and see all of the apps that are available. The apps are separated into categories, so you can see all of the core apps that form part of the core service, so the free and open source applications that we'll be keeping up-to-date.

You can also go through and see the apps that are available in the different bands, so band A being the simpler and least expensive applications, band B in the middle, and band C the more complicated apps. Once you found the app that you need you can click on 'request package,' and that will take you through to a request form where you can login with your AppsAnywhere support account, let us know which version you require, some details of the software license, media, and any other bits and pieces. As Phil said, bits and bobs, as we say in the UK. Then, you can submit your request and we'll package up that application up for you and provide you with a ready-to-use STP that you can deploy with AppsAnywhere and Cloudpaging.

In order to get access to this service there's a couple of subscription options available to you. First of all, if you're just interested in the free and open source apps we have a core subscription, this is an annual cost, and that will get you access to the portal where you can download all of the free and source apps that are ready to go. There's no request form for those, you just click on the button, and you can download the STP file straight away.

If you're interested in having some of the licensed applications packaged for you then you'll probably want to look at our Plus Subscription. The Plus Subscription includes everything under core, but with the addition of 6000 packaging credits, and those packaging credits can be used flexibly to choose any of the apps from our menu, so you can place requests at any time. Or, if you're using Adobe CC with Named User Licensing you can choose to take the whole of the Adobe bundle and that is 3000 credits. You can also top up credits later in the year, so if you use those 6000 and you want to order more applications you can, of course, buy some more credits to do so.

We're really hoping that lots and lots of you will take advantage of this new service. Obviously, the more subscribers that we have the more that we can pre-prepare the applications, and the more we'll be able to lower prices. What we're really trying to do is move apps into the lower bands so that you get the best possible value. So, I do hope this is of interest. If you would have like to have a look at the menu you can actually sign up via our website, and that's at appsanywhere.com/packaging-service. You'll be able to see full details of the service they are including some PDFs with all of the apps. Or, you can get can register and get instant access to the portal, and have a look for yourselves.

So, thank you very much for attending the webinar. I hope this is of interest. Phil and myself will hang around now and we'll try to take some questions. I see some of you are typing into the question panel right now, so if you do have any questions feel free to ask those, or pop them in the chat and we'll try to help. As I said, more information is available on the website and you can, of course, contact Phil Spitze in the US if you'd like to ask any questions, or myself in the UK here, we're here to help as well.

So, thanks again for joining. We'll just look through the questions now, so if you want to stick around we'll try to answer any questions that you have.