Mitel authorizedPARTNERs must meet a series of stringent requirements in order to sell and support Mitel products in the marketplace. These include ongoing training for sales and technical services; processes and benchmarks to provide quality customer service; and a high degree of expertise in voice communications, data networking, and applicable applications such as virtualization, conferencing, collaboration, contact centers and mobility.

“With the addition of Mitel’s world class portfolio of advanced business communication products to our existing offerings, we are excited and confident that we can provide customers of any size with solutions that are tailored to meet their specific needs and deliver exceptional business value,” said  John Marciano, COO, KIS.
About KIS
Established in 1988, as an Enterprise Systems Integrator, KIS has since grown into a leading professional Network Integration Firm for the West Coast. KIS chose to become a multidisciplinary, client focused and vendor-agnostic provider of Professional Services based on Client feedback. Project coordination among multiple vendors is a recurring pain point for IT consumers, however, KIS provides mitigation and forward-moving resolve. KIS’ client centric modality requires its team to maintain expertise, authorizations and transparency for OEMs across-the-board, allowing the Client to make well informed decisions on the best fitting solutions. Not only has KIS’ scope expanded from a Services vantage, KIS now has a national presence with six physical locations to better serve our valued Clients with their Virtualization, Networking, Management and IT Infrastructure needs. For more information please visit: http://www.kiscc.com
About Mitel
Mitel (Nasdaq:MITL) is a global provider of business communications and collaboration software and services. Mitel’s Freedom architecture provides the flexibility and simplicity organizations need to support today’s dynamic work environment. Through a single cloud-ready software stream, Mitel delivers a powerful suite of advanced communications and collaboration capabilities that provides freedom from walled garden architectures and enables organizations to implement best-of-breed solutions on any network; extends the “in-office” experience anywhere, on any device; and offers choice of commercial options to fit business needs. For more information visit: http://www.mitel.com

Mitel and the Mitel logo are registered trademarks of Mitel Networks Corporation.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Marlborough, Mass., April 5, 2012 – Unidesk and solution partner KIS will discuss Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) best practices and showcase the latest version of the Unidesk® virtual desktop provisioning and application delivery platform at the Silicon Valley VMware User Group (VMUG) Conference April 11, 2012, at the Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, Calif.  Organizations interested in how customers in education, state and local government, healthcare and other industries are implementing Unidesk desktop layering technology to overcome many of the cost, complexity, and user acceptance challenges that have stalled broader VDI adoption can meet with Unidesk and KIS experts in Booth #21 from 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. To register, sign up for a complimentary VMUG membership at:  http://www.vmug.com/e/in/eid=313.

With Unidesk, IT administrators can quickly create and configure custom virtual desktops using reusable operating system and application “layers.”  One operating system layer can be used for all desktops, while application layers can be assigned to different desktops as needed to meet individual or departmental requirements, without ever having to reinstall the application.  Unidesk’s ability to share common OS and application layers across many desktops reduces VDI storage capacity requirements as much as ¬70%.  Each desktop can also have a personalization layer that sustains all end user customizations, including user-installed applications, helping extend VDI implementations to knowledge workers.  These combined capabilities are quickly establishing Unidesk as the leading desktop management platform for VDI.

Unidesk and KIS are driving VDI projects at the City of Foster City, the City of Pleasanton, Tulare County, Hartnell College and more.  For a free whitepaper on how Unidesk makes VDI the easy choice over refreshing PCs, download the free whitepaper, “Desktop OpEx Savings: the Key to Cost-Justifying VDI”  at http://www.unidesk.com/opex-white-paper.

About Unidesk
Unidesk® Corporation (www.unidesk.com) enables customers to centralize more desktops on data center servers and realize the full potential of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).  Unidesk’s patent-pending desktop layering technology works with VDI access solutions such as VMware View™, Citrix® XenDesktop®, and Pano Logic to sustain all desktop customizations for end users, while simplifying application delivery and desktop provisioning, patching and support for IT. By creating persistent and non-persistent virtual desktops on VMware vSphere® that are storage-efficient, easy-to-manage, and able to satisfy any use case, Unidesk desktop management software for VDI reduces IT operations costs up to 30%, cuts VDI storage costs up to 70%, and fosters a more productive, agile workforce. Unidesk Corp. is a privately-held company with headquarters in Marlborough, Mass, USA

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Unidesk® is a registered trademark of Unidesk Corporation. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Established in 1988, as an Enterprise Systems Integrator, KIS has since grown to become a leading professional Network Integration Firm for the West Coast. KIS chose to become a multidisciplinary, client focused and vendor-agnostic provider of Professional Services based on our Clients’ feedback. Project coordination among multiple vendors is recurring pain point for IT consumers, however, KIS provides mitigation and forward-moving resolve. Our client centric modality requires KIS to maintain expertise, authorizations and transparency for OEMs across-the-board, allowing the Client to make well informed decisions on the best fitting solutions. Not only has our scope expanded from a Services vantage, we now have a national presence with six physical locations to better serve our valued Clients.

Customer Satisfaction Excellence is the highest distinction a partner can achieve within the Cisco Channel Partner Program. KIS COMPUTER CENTER (USA) will be recognized for Customer Satisfaction Excellence in the Cisco Partner Locator (www.cisco.com/go/partnerlocator) with a special star indicator representing your achievement. Customers, Cisco personnel and partners will be able to identify you as having achieved outstanding customer satisfaction as part of Cisco’s worldwide assessment process.

Channel Customer Satisfaction Excellence assessment is based upon the customer satisfaction results captured in the Cisco Partner Access Online tool (www.cisco.com/go/pal). Each measurement period, Cisco will acknowledge Certified Partners that have the highest customer satisfaction distinction within each geographic region.

Customer Satisfaction Excellence is a core value we both share and a key driver of our current and future success. Thank you for your commitment to the success of your customers.

For more information on Cisco Channel Customer Satisfaction Excellence, please visit: http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/pr11/pr20/partners_customer_satisfaction_concept_home.html

“With the solid state market expected to grow from $800 million in 2011 to $2.5 billion in 2014 according to IDC, FlashPoint enables Nimbus business partners to strengthen client relationships by helping them solve persistent storage performance and operating cost challenges,” stated Thomas Isakovich, CEO of Nimbus Data Systems. “Nimbus’ industry-leading flash storage systems, winner of Storage Magazine’smost recent Product of the Year award in storage systems, are ideal for server and desktop virtualization, databases, HPC, and high-performance cloud infrastructure.”

“Having stringently evaluated a variety of solid state technologies, Arkay has chosen to align with Nimbus Data Systems,” stated Richard Kuhar, VP Business Development at Arkay, a leading nationwide storage-centric solutions provider. “In today’s performance-driven and cost-conscious IT climate, Nimbus provides what our clients need: an enterprise-class flash memory storage system with both exceptional performance and comprehensive data management features. Not only is Nimbus’ technology sound, it is also surprisingly affordable, and the timing could not be better.”

Channel-Focused Strategy
The FlashPoint Partner Program addresses the biggest challenges facing IT solution providers – eroding margins, lack of both innovative and proven storage solutions, and complex sales and support programs. Rather than relying on direct sales, Nimbus has built a business development team that works hand-in-hand with business partners to identify new opportunities and accelerate sales and technical engagements with prospective customers. Nimbus solutions are easy to install and administer so partners can spend more time cultivating new business rather than supporting lengthy deployments.

Comprehensive Yet Simple Solutions
Nimbus does away with the complex pricing models and configuration tools typical of conventional enterprise storage vendors. Nimbus’ all-inclusive pricing eliminates per-feature license fees, providing the full features of Nimbus’ HALO storage management platform at no additional cost. The comprehensive HALO software includes unified iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NFS, Infiniband, and CIFS capability, snapshots, replication, cloning, thin provisioning, encryption, and much more. Nimbus support programs are also easy to understand, offering two support levels (Basic and Platinum) with a simple flat price per system.

High Growth Business Opportunity for All Partners
Instead of classifying partners into tiers with different pricing and support obligations, Nimbus offers all partners an equal opportunity to differentiate themselves through their own value-added capabilities. Nimbus ensures that the hard work and evangelism of our partners is well-rewarded. The ideal partners bring unique expertise in key technologies where Nimbus solutions are particularly well-suited: server virtualization, VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), databases, datawarehousing, eDiscovery, scientific applications, content creation and delivery, and cloud infrastructure. Nimbus solutions are often teamed with virtualization software from VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft, databases from Oracle, Microsoft, and open-source, and networking infrastructure from Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, QLogic, and many others.

What Our Partners Are Saying

“Nimbus enterprise solid state storage systems enable us to architect high-performance storage solutions that easily exceed our customer’s expectations,” said John Thome Jr., VP Sales at Chi Corporation. “Our partnership with Nimbus will help bring intelligent, cost-effective solid state storage solutions to our growing list of commercial, education and government end-users.”

“KIS has been scouring the industry for a solution to the problems plaguing its clients in the move to desktop virtualization,” said Sean Canevaro, CEO of KIS. “After two years, we have found the only company that can actually deliver on its claims of performance, capacity, and price. That solution is Nimbus Data Systems. We set a very high bar, and Nimbus cleared it easily. Working with their team has resulted in creating and closing several opportunities in a very short time. Nimbus is absolutely as advertised: the best performing, highly-scalable, and cost-effective solution for our Virtualization and Cloud Solutions.”

Learn More
Solution providers interested in learning more about Nimbus’ FlashPoint program can do so by visiting our website at www.nimbusdata.com. Nimbus will also be hosting business partner webinars over the coming months; please see the schedule on our website.

Foster City is one of several local government organizations implementing Unidesk and VMware View, chosen here to provide desktop consistency, central gold image patching, rapid application delivery, and SAN storage savings. The City anticipates multiple benefits from its approach to VDI, including a reduction in staff time required to manage desktop software issues and hardware failures, as well as the ability to centrally control and deploy applications.  Employees will benefit from a persistent desktop experience that preserves all user preferences and persona changes, even after IT administrators patch or update Microsoft Windows or key applications.  Lower energy consumption compared to full-size PCs and an easier move to Microsoft Windows 7 will further benefit the City once the VDI rollout is complete.

According to Foster City Senior Systems Analyst Rob Lasky, The City will continue to use full desktops at designated locations, but the majority of its users will be migrated to the new virtual desktops provisioned and managed by Unidesk, delivered by VMware View, and accessed through Wyse P20 zero clients.   The City’s IT division serves multiple departments ranging from public works, recreation, fire, police, finance and more, and manages more than 50 different applications across this diverse user community. Many users require high performance desktops that can quickly receive new applications, updates and patches, as well as be repaired instantly.  Physical PCs have fans, power supplies, and hard drives that fail, and deploying a replacement PC is labor intensive.  Also, keeping diverse software updated on physical PCs is difficult, at best.  These challenges, the IT division concluded, steered the move to VDI.

Prior to selecting Unidesk and VMware View, Foster City ran a comprehensive VDI assessment over several weeks, on more than 20 desktops across different departments to assess everything from CPU and memory utilization to graphics capabilities, peak hours, disk IOPS, network utilization, and application usage.  Foster City also ran a multiple-month proof of concept testing a variety of virtual desktop solutions.  This was followed by a detailed request for proposal issued to a number of vendors and service providers. “We wanted to make sure we could deliver a virtual desktop that was as good as or better than before VDI, ensure our users were the right fit for what VDI could deliver, and learn as much as we could from others who had gone through VDI implementations before us,” said Lasky.

The result of this rigorous process was the selection of Unidesk and VMware View.

“We chose VMware View because of its flexible access options, proven brokering capabilities, and our familiarity and experience with the VMware vSphere™ tool set.  We chose Unidesk because of its fresh approach to VDI management that we found especially appropriate for our environment,” said Lasky.  “Any city looking to reduce the long term costs of PC refresh and management will find Unidesk unique in its ability to handle the challenges of operating system, application and user persona management, all in a single solution.”

“The City of Foster City performed a very careful VDI assessment and clearly understands the value virtual desktops can bring to the city,” said John Marciano, Chief Operating Officer and Director of Sales at KIS. “We’re very excited to be chosen to implement this leading edge project based on best-in-class solutions from VMware and Unidesk.”

Unidesk dynamically combines IT-packaged operating system and application layers with each user’s unique personalization layer to create virtual desktops that are centrally managed according to IT standards, yet customized to the needs of each user. Lasky said this made Unidesk a good fit for Foster City, which wanted a simple way to deliver applications to virtual desktops without the scripting, recording, sequencing and programming often required by traditional PC configuration and application virtualization tools.  City administrators simply install applications once to create Unidesk application layers, and then assign the layers to one or more desktops.

“Unidesk lets us virtualize all of our applications without complicated programming, and also lets us roll out updates to pools of users with greater speed and flexibility. It even lets users customize their desktops and applications, without negatively affecting our ability to manage the desktops,” said Lasky.

Easing the administration process for both the IT departments and users was also an important goal addressed by Unidesk.

“One of our biggest challenges was gold image maintenance windows. With some other VDI solutions, we  could have been looking at system-wide downtimes of up to two hours per month just for patching gold images with Windows updates,” said Lasky. “Now we can apply patches centrally, deploy them from the Unidesk console, and users will get the updates when they reboot.  I like that we don’t need to schedule monthly downtime just for Microsoft patches.”

“Another application in our Police Department is frequently patched, and traditionally our end users have been able to apply these without IT assistance,” said Lasky.  “This would have been difficult to do with other ‘sandboxed’ application virtualization techniques, but we were able to deliver the virtual application with Unidesk while still allowing user initiated updates.”

Choosing Unidesk as a centralized desktop management solution also gives Foster City the ability to perform instant repair and rollback of desktops in the event of lost files, viruses or other problems. This higher level of service will help facilitate user acceptance of the new VDI environment, as will Unidesk’s unique support for “persistent” personal desktops.  Unidesk captures all profile settings, documents, user-installed applications, and plug-ins in each user’s personalization layer, and preserves this layer through IT-driven updates and patches to the operating system and centrally assigned applications.  As a result, users with the rights to install their own applications and perform their own updates can do so, without worrying about their changes being lost.

Foster City’s Lasky added, “It’s great that VDI will make desktop administration easier, but if it doesn’t meet our users’ needs, we might as well forget it.  Unidesk’s ability to create persistent, user-customizable, and storage-efficient virtual desktops and VMware View’s support for a high performance user experience will ensure we get the user buy-in we need for the project to be successful,” said Lasky.

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VMware, VMware View, and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Unidesk® is a registered trademark of Unidesk Corporation. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

VMware, the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the data center and to the cloud, recognizes Premier status on partners who have met its strict standards for certification. Companies must demonstrate rigorous technical staff certifications and possess the resources to assess, design, implement, manage and support virtualized environments.

KIS has adopted VMware’s virtualization strategy across all core technology solutions sets, including; systems, storage and software, networking, communications and security, and data center solutions, as well as through their managed services division.

John Marciano, KIS’s Chief Operating Officer said, “KIS is honored to be recognized with VMware Premier Partner status. Virtualization is the fastest growing segment of our business and we look forward to taking it to the next level.  Knowing that virtualization is an important topic on the mind for all IT decision makers, and VMware is the widely recognized market leader means KIS is committed to realizing and maintaining the necessary capabilities to provide the best service we can to our customers. We continue to strengthen our data center solutions portfolio to help organizations optimize their IT environments from the desktop to the data center. Premier partner status with VMware only enhances this effort.”

“Virtualization is about bringing efficiency, flexibility and control to IT infrastructure,” said Sean Canevaro, CEO of KIS. “KIS is well positioned to create strategic and innovative virtualization solutions for our clients. The additional support and services provided by VMware as a Premier partner enhances our ability to transform inflexible IT environments to private clouds that can bring tremendous cost savings and productivity gains to our customers.”

The event featured exhibits and demonstrations from:

• VMware
• Dell
• Veeam
• Compellent
• Microsoft
• LANDesk
• Cisco
• Wyse
• Barracuda Networks
• Project 2
• CORAID
• Sonicwall
• Novell
• Kaspersky
• Falconstor

Many attendees described the Vendor BBQ as a relaxed, fun environment to acquire information on the latest technology solutions and cost-saving IT initiatives. John Marciano, COO of KIS, said the event was a “great opportunity” for customers to talk with key IT vendors in person”.

In addition to the many technology solutions that were on display, attendees had an opportunity to interact with live demos provided by VMware, Dell, Compellent, Falconstor, Project 2, PKware, Wyse, and Kaspersky. Exhibitors also spoke about the initiatives their companies are taking to help cut costs and how guests could implement these solutions within their own business.

Click here for pictures.

To be put on KIS invitation list, please email dianab@kiscc.com for Vendor BBQ Event in 2012.

Return to Publications List

KIS has been named to the inaugural CRN Tech Elite 250. The Tech Elite 250 serves as the industry’s definitive list of VARs with both deep technical expertise and premier certifications. has been recognized as a best-of-breed integrator who has invested in technical know-how and earned premier certifications in the areas of for North American customers. To view the complete list of winners visit here.

CRN Editors worked with solution providers and outside experts to define the most important technical certifications in the market today. By mapping certifications against the key technology opportunities as defined by CRN’s State of the Market and Midmarket study, the Tech Elite 250 recognizes the VARs most committed to helping customers innovate while reducing costs.

As a leader in IT Solutions, KIS provides corporate and enterprise computer systems and related products to our Clients. Our capabilities provide our Clients, companies of any size, with a complete and customizable solution to manage every aspect of the systems life cycle.

“The Tech Elite 250 recognizes an elite group of VARs who are successfully navigating the dynamic IT channel market,” said Kelley Damore, Vice President, Editorial Director at Everything Channel. “By adapting to new customer purchasing patterns and redefining best practices, these solution providers are delivering the strategies and value customers demand to compete in today’s competitive economic environment.”

In addition, KIS will join its Tech Elite peers at Everything Channel’s XChange Solution Provider event next month to help define the future of the IT channel.

“Our employees and chosen partners got us here. We appreciate the recognition and will continue to work hard our customers”, said, John Marciano, COO and Director of Sales at KIS.

To learn more about Everything Channel, visit us at http://www.everythingchannel.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/everythingchnl.

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Scott Regan, Senior Marketing Manager

Everything Channel
508.416.1186
scott.regan@ec.ubm.com

Our Vendor Fair is designed to give business people hands-on experience and direct communication with top industry experts.

When: Friday, June 25th, 2010

Time: Doors open at 10:30 AM PST. Event ends at 3:30 PM PST

Location: 4027 Clipper Court, Fremont, CA 94538

Website: http://kisvendorbbq.eventbrite.com/

As a multi-platform consulting and support provider, KIS works with clients to build a stable, manageable network using “best of breed” technologies. Their Professional Services groups are built around 4 core practices areas (Network, Management, Security, and Storage), and are further defined into 26 specific practice areas.

“At KIS, we have a passion for helping businesses make technology decisions that are right for their organization,” said John Marciano, Chief Operating Officer at KIS. “Our Vendor Fair allows us to meet face to face with business people in our community, customize demonstrations according to their individual business needs, and build a lasting relationship so they know who to turn to as their business grows.”

Information and free registration is available by visiting http://kisvendorbbq.eventbrite.com/or by emailing sonia@kiscc.com.    

Recommended Audience: IT Professionals, Business Executives, C-Level Executives, IT Managers, System Administrators, Network Administrators, IT Directors or anyone interested in learning about the latest technology solutions for their business.

Featured Exhibitors: Barracuda, Cisco, CORAID, Compellent, Dell, Exagrid, Kaspersky, LANDesk, Lenovo, Microsoft, Novell, Pano Logic, Syncsort, VMware, USDN.

About KIS

KIS is a privately held network solutions firm headquartered in Fremont, CA. As a professional services organization, since 1988, KIS has served clients from major corporations, education, and government organizations to small and medium business customers. KIS provides strategic network design, network security, and network management, integration, and support services.  KIS is located online at www.kiscc.com .