Microsoft plays catch-up with Kidaro

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 27 May 2008 07:40

Opinion and Analysis

The news that Microsoft intends to incorporate Kidaro's virtualisation technologies into Microsoft Optimized Desktop Pack (MDOP) is a bit of a yawn: haven't we seen this all before?

The basic idea is that Kidaro lets you run native and virtualised applications all on the one desktop.

That's not a bad idea, and it's pretty easy to see how it might be put to work. Maybe you want to move your desktop fleet to Vista, but there's just one key application that (for some obscure reason) is holding you back.

Or perhaps you want to run certain applications in virtualised desktops driven by servers in your data centre, while others remain on users' local hardware - but without making them navigate more than one desktop. (You may plan to increase over time the number of applications running in the data centre in order to reduce the frequency of hardware refreshes around the organisation.)

From the users' perspective, that's the obvious way to do it: when they run a program, it appears in a window on their desktop. They don't want or need to know that some programs are running as normal, others are running under a virtualised operating system, and yet others are running back in the data centre.

Microsoft's promising this for 2009 - but it's really nothing new.

I'll describe some of the products that are already available over the page.