VMWare buys Thinstall
As pointed out by my colleague Danny, and trumpeted in The Register, VMWare has recently purchased Thinstall.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/15/vmware_buys_thinstall/
This puts some heavy muscle behind one of SoftGrid/AppVirt’s competitors. One can only speculate what the San Francisco to Palo Alto move will mean for the product, but personally, I hope they invest heavily in bringing Thinstall’s feature set into parity or dramatic competition with AppVirt. My colleagues here in Seattle and I are passionate SoftGrid-ites from back in the dizay and have, on more than one occasion, evaluated Thinstall as a potential technology for our customers. We found it somewhat lacking, but definitely “one to watch.”
It’s no news to anyone that VMWare and Microsoft are on a collision course for domination of the burgeoning virtualization market. If one believes the free market theories, competition will only make both products stronger, meaning that our collective hallucinations and passionate ramblings about “Software as a Service” and the Zero-Touch Desktop will only solidify faster. This move is a big win for IT departments considering application virtualization as part of their overall strategy for decreased TCO on desktops, more centralized administration, and self-service application provisioning. Oh, and if you’re among those IT departments not considering this technology, I’d love to know why not! I’m not being flip here: after working with this technology and envisioning the new avenues these products and methodologies open up, I strain to consider how this could be a bad thing.
The IOTeam will be watching Thinstall with a greedy hunger. We’ll let you know what we find.
