MokaFive

MokaFive is a California-based technology company that provides desktop virtualization solutions. The company offers products and services to clients that have traditionally relied on the Windows operating system. Located in Redwood City, the company has raised $36 million in venture capital funding since its founding in 2005. Client-side virtualization allows the IT department to manage all of the computers in the organization with one central console. Official rollout of the first MokaFive Suite was in April, 2008.
MokaFive was involved early on in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement. MokaFive’s technology allows users to bring their own computers, laptops, tablets, or smartphones to the workplace and download the company desktop. The new package allows service providers to offer IT services to several other companies at the same time.
Dale L. Fuller is the current director of MokaFive. He officially took on the role on March 8, 2012. Fuller had served on the board of directors since 2008. The Collective project was started by the Stanford SUIF group, headed by Prof. Monica Lam, Prof. Mendel Rosenblum, and Prof. Dan Boneh. The objective was "to develop a new computing system architecture that is secure, reliable, easy to administer, and provides ubiquitous access to users' computing environments."
The Collective project began in 1999 with the exploration of a stateless thin-client architecture, a la Sun Ray, where computation would occur on a centralized server. A thin-client architecture had the advantage of centralized management and allowing a user's data to live in the network, but it had some serious flaws: namely, it was not possible to work while disconnected (e.g. on a disconnected laptop or an unreliable network connection), it required a substantial server infrastructure, and it required a high-bandwidth low-latency network, which was not always possible with distant remote offices.
To address the flaws of the thin-client model, the Collective group developed a new system where a centrally managed virtual machine would run locally on the user's computer. In this way, they were able to get the benefits of the thin-client model (easy management and administration) without many of the downsides (reliance on server infrastructure and fast network connection, no disconnected operation). The Collective architecture was presented in a paper at the HotOS conference in May 2003. This paper first coined the term Virtual Appliance, later picked up by VMware. Later publications in LISA 2003 and NSDI 2005 expanded upon this idea.
See Also
* Virtual appliance
* Virtual machine
* X86 virtualization

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