If there is anything our business loves more than technology it’s acronyms. And the cloud has more than its share, most of them ending with ‘aaS’. There’s SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, DRaaS and now NaaS. So what is NaaS? According to Numecent, it stands for Native as a Service.
NaaS runs on top of the company’s cloudpaging technology. And what is cloudpaging? Cloudpaging is a new form of virtualization, really a form of application virtualization. It takes existing packages apps and other like forms of application virtualization, and turns them into a service. In this case, the application can be streamed from the cloud.
Investors already know the meaning and importance of cloudpaging and recently put an additional $13.6 million into the already well-financed Numecent. The native in NaaS refers to the fact that the technology easily supports native apps.
“Numecent's NaaS platform enables ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and developers to deliver their inventory of applications from the Cloud – piracy and friction-free – with optional subscription and without any changes to their source code,” the company said. “In essence, NaaS is to cloud-delivered native applications, what SaaS is to Web-applications. Applications delivered through NaaS provide the immediacy, agility and the liberating user experience of a web-app but with the superior performance, rich functionality and ecosystem continuity benefits which only native applications can deliver. NaaS can also drastically reduce the revenue loss attributed to piracy as there is never an unencrypted or persistent executable to 'crack' on the client device.”
The NaaS service, which is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is multi-tenant out of the box, can be white-labeled by partners. The service is also boosted by a worldwide Content Delivery Network.
“As the delivery of digital goods moves unstoppably towards the Cloud, companies offering SaaS have been reaping enormous economic benefits with their Web applications,” said Osman Kent, co-founder and CEO of Numecent. “However, until the advent of NaaS, most ISVs with native applications have been unable to participate in this new economy due to technical, financial and resourcing barriers. NaaS changes all that – it is an instant enabler for ISVs, large and small, who want to monetize their inventory now – with or without subscription. NaaS is an effortless on-ramp to the Cloud economy for ISVs.”
Investor Love
Numecent investors think the underlying cloudpaging technology is a major breakthrough.
“Numecent has a potentially game-changing new technology with a huge "wow" factor,” said Dr. Aleksandar Mitrovic, Senior Vice President for Deutsche Telekom's Product & Innovation division during the recent investment. “As Telcos around the world evolve to become Cloud services providers for consumers, SMBs and enterprises alike, disruptive technologies such as Numecent's cloudpaging will offer unique differentiation opportunities and compelling benefits for our users.”
Numecent was co-founded by Osman Kent, who sold his previous company 3Dlabs for $170 million just over a decade ago to Creative Labs. Kent apparently found about Endeavors and its application virtualization technology, quickly swallowed it up, and rebranded as Numecent.
Also this May, Gartner named Numecent a “Cool Vendor in Client Computing”.
Edited by
Ryan Sartor
