VMWare has announced the acquisition of application virtualization provider Thinstall, adding considerable flexibility to their virtual systems portfolio and buying their way in to the next big virtualization market: application software.

VMware has made its name virtualizing entire operating systems through it's vmware server and Workstation offerings, delivering flexibility and efficiency at the machine level, but while this has proven a boon to server administrators, IT staff, and developers, it has not proven as simple and effective an approach at the desktop user level. It's handy for a developer to have several different virtual machines to work in, or for enterprise data centers to use their servers at capacity by deploying multiple system images on a single physical machine, but it's mostly just cumbersome for desktop users. Virtualization adoption has reflected this, taking off in server rooms but lagging far behind on the desktop.

A more useful approach is to virtualize only the applications being deployed. This has all the same benefits of standardizing the platform and securing the system, without the complications of maintaining a complete virtualized operating system. Additionally, virtualized applications require none of the tweaking and adjustment to the host operating system that the same applications might if installed directly onto the host. This has particular implications for security; a major difficulty in adequately securing most Windows machines is the awkward fact that many common applications require administrative permissions to run properly. Virtualizing those same applications can allow them to run on the host PC in a reduced security context, dealing a blow to a common hole taken advantage of by many virus and spyware authors today.

More information on Thinstall and application virtualization in general can be found on VMware's site announcing the acquisition.