Reducing VDI Sprawl And Creating Computing Bubbles at Le Moyne College

In Syracuse, NY, Le Moyne College have seen a cool EdTech future. By using unique, but easily-managed 'student computing bubbles' the college aims to fulfil a student’s hardware and software requirements depending on what a student actually needs.

This awesome student-focussed approach aims to reduce VDI sprawl (and associated cost!) whilst providing much better outcomes.

Background

Located in picturesque Syracuse, New York, Le Moyne College is a diverse learning community that strives for academic excellence in the Catholic and Jesuit tradition, through its comprehensive programs rooted in the liberal arts and sciences. Its emphasis is on education of the whole person and on the search for meaning and value as integral parts of the intellectual life.

Le Moyne College seeks to prepare its members for leadership and service in their personal and professional lives to promote a more just society. Currently, Le Moyne College serves over 3500 traditional and non-traditional students and offers over 40 programs of study.

Download the Le Moyne College case study

Delivering apps with application virtualization

After a successful deployment of VMware Horizon View as its VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) solution, the Le Moyne Systems Administration department selected AppsAnywhere as their preferred solution for software virtualization.

After reviewing multiple products from major names such as Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix, the team felt that AppsAnywhere is the leader in the software virtualization space, leveraging a unique and patented block paging technology for better customization and increased performance.

Solving 3 IT challenges

The Le Moyne team sees AppsAnywhere as a solution to three major challenges and goals they have on their computing roadmap:

1. Reduce VDI sprawl by consolidating pools created around specialized software needs, thus also reducing licensing costs.
2. Achieve the vision of “just-in-time” software delivery, abandoning the legacy approach of “just-in-case” delivery, which leads to image bloat and can increase regression testing time.
3. Achieve their EUC (end user computing) vision of driving all hardware and software provisioning by the needs of each user, effectively creating a unique but easily-managed computing bubble around each person.

After only 10 days with the product, the Le Moyne team have packaged and deployed over a dozen software applications, and is looking forward to the summer break when they will completely overhaul the campus-wide software provisioning system.

For a small investment, AppsAnywhere has enabled us to finally enjoy many, if not all, of the benefits originally sold to us regarding VDI.

Phil Spitze, Senior System Admin at Le Moyne College

To help educate their user community, they've launched a creative marketing strategy called “Meet AJ” [Application Jukebox], who they are introducing as the newest member of the IT department.

The team at Le Moyne College are one of the most forward thinking and student-focussed I have ever met. We love the concept of student computing bubbles; providing the tech a user needs where and when it is needed.

I've met many organizations trying to use VDI to deploy everything, at the expense of the user experience. It’s really exciting to meet a college looking to adapt and focus on what a student actually needs.

Nick Johnson, cool EdTech pioneer and AppsAnywhere co-founder