MokaFive, the four-year-old Stanford University spin-out backed by Khosla Ventures and Highland Capital Partners to wrestle with making the desktop into a service, claims to have reached a turning point and overcome the major barrier to widespread enterprise adoption of virtual desktops.

It's taken the pricey server farm familiar in DaaS out of the equation while still providing the benefits of central management and the power of mass customization.

Its new MokaFive Suite, the 2.0 version of the company's desktop virtualization technology, lets companies host a secure desktop management solution in-house, giving them complete policy-based control and giving the user persistent personalization of his data, settings and applications.

IT administrators can centrally create, deliver, secure and update a so-called LivePC, a fully contained virtual desktop, to thousands of users. LivePC images run locally; users download their secure virtual desktop over a web link and run it on any computer - Mac, Linux or Windows - from anywhere.

Admins can update and patch the single golden image and MokaFive automatically distributes the changes to each LivePC.

The company's proprietary layered management approach lets the admin update or fix the corporate operating system and applications while persisting the user-specific customizations. MokaFive separates the hardware, OS and user personality, controlling them independently.

That's how IT defines the single image that can be customized for groups and personalized by individual users.

MokaFive Suite integrates with existing enterprise infrastructure such as Active Directory, software distribution, and app virtualization and adds two-factor authentication. It can define levels of lockdown based on targeted groups.

The company claims 42% lower TCO due to its small data center footprint, quick deployment, and simplified management. It figures it cuts desktop support costs by up to 60%, desktop management costs by 45%, and eliminates endpoint hardware procurement and support costs.

It says it protects corporate assets, ensures compliance, and sidesteps disasters.

In case of failure, users simply restart their LivePC, reverting to the widgetry's pristine state without losing any of the personalization, the company's approach to self-healing.

The widgetry works on- and offline.

According to Andi Mann, vice-president of research at Enterprise Management Associates, "MokaFive's approach to sophisticated management, portability and a patch-once and distribute model is unique in that it is lightweight, updates require no interruption to the user, and from a security perspective, there is nothing left behind on the machine you're working on. The impressive aspect to this new enterprise platform is that it goes beyond addressing technology concerns to solving real business challenges."

The company has 21 patents pending.

Gartner predicts there will be 660 million virtualized PCs by 2011. MokaFive currently had 10,000 paid users and figures it'll be at 100,000 by the end of the year. It finds it captures users that reject VMware and Citrix, particularly users where executives have a say, such as health care, financial and education.