Ardence Inc. announced the release of version 4.0 of its Ardence Software Streaming Platform, which offers improvements in the product's manageability, scalability and reliability. The company believes that two product enhancements in particular, Common Image functionality and a comprehensive architectural redesign of the platform, will make it easier for customers to transition from their current Windows operat Ardence Inc. announced the release of version 4.0 of its Ardence Software Streaming Platform, which offers improvements in the product’s manageability, scalability and reliability.The company believes that two product enhancements in particular, Common Image functionality and a comprehensive architectural redesign of the platform, will make it easier for customers to transition from their current Windows operating system to Windows Vista once it becomes available. Richard J. Davis, Ardence Chairman, CEO and President, said that the company has been listening to their customers and channel partners requests for additional scalability in the product. “We’ve delivered that scalability with this latest version”, Davis said. “Also, in their ongoing drive to manage as few images as possible, customers wanted the ability to stream an identical operating system/application image on-demand from the network to desktops and servers, irrespective of any hardware differences. With Common Image that breakthrough capability is now possible,” he added. Significant Ardence 4.0 enhancements include: Ardence 4.0’s Common-Image functionality enables additional reductions in the number of operating system and application images customers need to maintain and manage. In earlier versions, Ardence’s software-streaming capabilities enabled on-demand delivery of an identical OS/application image to multiple desktops from networked storage. However, until the release of 4.0, the number of identical images that IT departments had to maintain was dependent on the hardware the image was being streamed to. The more disparate the hardware, the more images that were required. With 4.0’s Common Image, Ardence can stream an identical OS/application image to computers with different network interface cards (NICs), different chipsets and different audio and video cards. Ardence 4.0’s architectural redesign has enabled increased scalability by taking advantage of technology advances in storage, in processors, in network interface cards (NICs), and in Gig-E networks that enable streamlined process communication by combining multiple processes into one integrated service. This results in less overhead and faster throughput. The redesign also allows better utilization of higher-powered, multi-processor servers by changing from a single-threaded to a multi-threaded architecture. Additionally, that 4.0 system administration has been revamped and the user interface has been redesigned to be more intuitive – features that make it easier to manage clients in the network. Software Development