Numescent Announces Cloud-Paging Technology, Set to Revolutionize Software Delivery

Today, adopting cloud computing has become an increasingly viable option for many companies. But the cloud presents new bandwidth and infrastructure challenges to enterprises of all sizes when it comes to working with remote software (SaaS (News - Alert)), especially gaming software. These common bandwidth obstacles cover a wide range, from remote server latencies, inefficient system performance to LAN/WAN bandwidth problems.

In general, while the cloud is good for streaming linear content such as movies and music, where one bit follows logically after another, it’s less good at nonlinear processing, like applications. Now, Numecent, a startup that has been pioneering “friction-free digital software delivery” through virtualization, has announced a new spinoff, Approxy, that may reshape software distribution, by making it far faster to deliver bits over the Internet. This is especially good news for gamers. The new patented technology, called “cloud paging,” allows users to run any application on a local system from the cloud, in an almost-instant, on-demand manner.

With cloud paging, which allows users to instantly access content, these kinds of bandwidth problems are minimized, if not entirely eliminated. Cloud-paging works by breaking software up into small pieces, called “pages,” that can then be pushed out dynamically. The end result, the company says, is a reduction by as much as 60x in deployment and delivery time of applications. And there’s also nothing to maintain. When the user is done using the virtual application or machine, there’s nothing left on the client machine.

According to Numecent CEO, Osman Kent, “What Dropbox (News - Alert) is to data, we are to software. We can take any Windows applications – Photoshop, Office, whatever, you name it – and we have a magic piece of software that can cloudify these applications on our servers. But there's even more magic: We are able to bring [these applications] back to you 20 to 100 times faster than what a digital download would have taken, and we execute them on your machine without installation--and it even works offline.”

The same experience can be applied to games. Most games worth having can be bought from download stores today, but they’re huge and take a lot of time to download and then install. What if you could just play whatever game you wanted, pay for the time you use it, and then stop paying when you’re done? For users, personalization and mobility are a few of the key advantages of a new technology such as cloud paging.

Benefits also accrue for administrators who struggle with bandwidth and software issues. Cost-savings is another benefit for companies adopting this new technology. For example, enterprises can reduce the cost of ownership of individual software licenses by contracting for software only when it’s needed. This eliminates the costs for having long-term individual licenses, and keeps data center overhead to a minimum.