VMware to buy Thinstall to streamline application provisioning

By Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 15 January 2008 23:37

Market

Virtualisation software specialist, VMware is to acquire Thinstall, a privately-held application virtualisation software company to expand its desktop virtualisation capabilities. It has also acquired services-related assets from Foedus, a provider of virtualisation technologies and services. VMware says the acquisition of Thinstall will enable its customers better provision, deploy and update desktop environments. It  intends to leverage Foedus' application and desktop virtualisation services expertise to help its partners expand their virtualisation services business. Foedus' remaining assets, including the company's sales and marketing organisations, were acquired earlier this month by GreenPages Technology, a US consultative IT solutions provider and VMware authorised consultant (VAC) partner.

According to VMware, Thinstall decouples applications from underlying operating systems, improving isolation and portability for applications across desktop environments. "Thinstall's unique, agentless approach to application virtualisation enables the rapid, secure and cost effective delivery of software applications to desktops. Agentless application virtualisation, pioneered by Thinstall, requires no pre-installed software on physical or virtual PC's and no new deployment infrastructure or management tools."

Thinstall's architecture integrates into existing application management systems to deliver virtualised applications across a variety of operating system versions (NT, 2000, XP, Vista) and enables applications to move with users as needed.

VMware claims that "Thinstall significantly decreases the time to value of a software application and reduces the overhead of costly integrations. For example, a large federal agency turned to Thinstall to completely eliminate software installation conflicts that previously ran as high as 20 percent. The same customer used Thinstall to cut regression testing by 70 percent as applications no longer had to be tested in every environment or with every other application."