VMware's Virtual World Goes Mobile
In VMware's world, nothing is real. Well, some things are -- VMware's hypervisor,
its VMware server and certainly revenues, competition, customers and partners
are all pretty real. But VMware's business is all about making real things virtual,
and now the company is bringing its virtual revolution to a new territory.
This week, the EMC subsidiary introduced a hypervisor for mobile devices that
is the result of its recent acquisition of French developer Trango Virtual Processors.
Trango's app is now VMware's Mobile
Virtualization Platform, and the company is targeting mobile phone makers
with its new offering.
The move is interesting for a lot of reasons, but we're intrigued by it mainly
because, as far as we can tell, Citrix and Microsoft haven't moved into the
mobile space yet. Either VMware sees some real opportunity there and is trying
to grab the market before everybody else does, or the company is covering a
few extra bases in an attempt to guarantee a revenue stream in case Microsoft
(for example) starts eating away at precious market share in the enterprise
-- or maybe a little of both.
In either case, it's another frontier for virtualization, a technology that
seems to have almost unlimited potential. The functionality involved might be
virtual, but the market and revenue potential could be very real. The only questions
at this point involve how long it will take for mobile technology to go virtual,
and how quickly VMware's competitors will follow it into this space. At this
point, it looks at though VMware's reputation as virtualization pioneer is solidly
intact.
Is there any limit to what virtualization can do? What are some creative uses
for it you've thought of or implemented? Share your thoughts at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on November 12, 2008