Numecent is an Irvine, California-based software technology company that develops software used to deliver native software applications from on premises, a server farm or the cloud. The patented technology, called Cloudpaging, is based on virtualization which allows the delivery of pre-virtualized software instructions to a user's machine on-demand, where the instructions are executed as soon as they are received.
History
Numecent's roots started in 1999 as a DARPA project at U.C. Irvine with Arthur Hitomi, one of three scientists who had formed Endeavors Technology Inc., an Irvine, California-based software development company. The project connected computers and mobile devices to Internet work groups and developed an application delivery technology to support these groups. In 2000, Tadpole Technology PLC, a maker of mobile computing devices and software, purchased Endeavors. In 2004, Tadpole also acquired Stream Theory, a California-based software company that developed technology for deploying application software over the Internet and across enterprise networks, with a focus on the gaming market. Those two companies constituted the genesis of the technology which later became known as Cloudpaging. In 2007, after patenting its application streaming technology, Tadpole decided to focus solely on developing that business. In 2008, Tadpole changed its name to Endeavors Technologies Inc. In 2009, Osman Kent, who had sold 3Dlabs to Creative Labs in 2002, acquired Endeavors and formed Numecent holdings. Before the company emerged into the end-user computing market with its technology, two former employees started a United Kingdom and Boston, MA-based spinoff called Software2, to help universities deploy Microsoft Windows applications on physical machines and on the cloud. In 2012, Numecent publicly launched with Osman Kent as CEO. In 2013, Numecent and Software2 announced a partnership, with Numecent's flagship Cloudpaging product, Application Jukebox Suite, deployed at 40 universities in the UK. By 2015, Application Jukebox Suite had been dropped as a product name in favor of the standalone trademarked name of Cloudpaging. In March 2015, Numecent announced the hiring of former BroadcomExecutive Vice President Tom Lagatta as CEO, and that Osman Kent was promoted to the role of Executive Chairman. In January 2017, co-founder and CTO, Arthur Hitomi became President and CEO.
Products
The company’s main product is Cloudpaging, which enables existing Windows applications to cloudpage to PCs, where they run, perform, and act as if they were natively installed. The Cloudpaging Server in conjunction with the Cloudpaging Player allows software to be delivered over the cloud by pre-virtualizing the software, after which it is encrypted and divided into small fragments the company calls "pages". The pages are delivered one at a time, where they are then executed on the client computer. The software also employs statistical modeling to dynamically predict which pages should be sent first. Cloudpaging makes desktop applications fully available faster, with less disk space required. Applications can also run if the computer is disconnected from the Internet, such as with a network outage. In August 2013, the company announced a service presently branded Cloudpaging CDN. Offered in conjunction with Amazon Web Services multi-tenant cloud, or via a self-hosting option, applications and virtualized licenses are cloudified and made available for delivery to end users without having to rewrite or recompile the underlying source code. In March 2017, the company announced an Android offering named Cloudpaging for Android that utilities Cloudpaging technology to reduce the impact of application install sizes on Android devices.
Spinoffs
Numecent announced the first spin off of its technology, Approxy, in 2012. Approxy offers a white-label delivery service for game developers and publishers. Approxy’s system reduces the delay for players, allowing them to start playing after only a few seconds of download, and additional code necessary to play is retrieved piece-by-piece. In October 2014, Numecent announced they were bringing the Approxy group back under the Numecent parent, in an attempt to attract game industry customers who required access to Cloudpaging source code.
Awards and recognition
Numecent was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Computing for 2013.
Funding
In February 2012, the company closed a Series A funding round of $2M. In May 2013 Numecent closed a Series B funding of $13.6M from T-Venture, Deutsche Telecom's venture funding arm. In November 2015, the company closed a Series C funding round of $15.5M.
