eChannelLine Daily News 6-June-2006 Everdream launches partner portal by Chris Talbot Everdream, a provider of on-demand desktop management services, is launching a new portal designed to make it easier for channel partners to sign up for and use the company's services. The new portal is a fully-automated system that offers partners and end-user customers the ability to do self-service qualification, procurement and deployment of Everdream's desktop management service. Channel partners are able to sign up on the site, try the service out for 30 days, buy the service and deploy the service often without any need for intervention on the part of an Everdream employee, said Ed Mueller, CMO of Everdream. The portal is a self-provisioning system that Mueller said emulates the best practices of the software as a service (SaaS) market. The company is also touting this on-demand aspect as a first for the industry. "A lot of what this is all about is specifically for our channel. The target audience for much of the work we have completed over the last six to nine months has been that audience," Mueller said. Everdream's service enables channel partners to do desktop management for their own customers without relying on what Mueller called "sneakernet" -- the manual work that must be done at a customer's site, where partners are required to walk around the location doing the installation, deploying and maintenance on each individual system. Additionally, the service is flexible enough to be useful by partners with SMB and enterprise customers. According to Mueller, the service is being used by partners serving SMBs with no more than 25 desktops, but it's also being used by large enterprises with thousands of computers, he said. "It's a multi-tenant, truly hierarchical platform for managing customers," Mueller said. He continued, "The big stumbling block for most of the channel partners out there is in order to really use this technology, there has been some two-way roadblocks to get access to this software and to quickly deploy this to their end-customers and get it up to speed quickly." The service is deployable automatically by sending out a small application to each desktop. The application runs in the background and, if it can access the Internet, connects with the Everdream service every 15 minutes to check for updates and patches of all types. Through the new portal, partners can check out the Everdream service for a 30-day free trial, during which they can test it out themselves on their own systems and at customers' sites. If they decide to subscribe to the service afterwards, they can purchase a subscription package from the portal. After that, the subscription can be managed from the desktop management console that is part of the service, Mueller said. Everdream will be offering a large amount of content to partners that is meant o help them streamline their own organizations to be more productive with the capabilities offered by Everdream's service while also educating them on how to take the service to their own customers, Mueller said.