Microsoft moving desktop into virtualization fold

Microsoft’s virtualization plans for the desktop are getting strong reviews, as users and analysts alike say that the benefits for IT should be reduced costs for deploying and managing devices and migrating between versions of software.

Microsoft’s plan for the desktop is centered on its pending acquisition of Softricity, a 7-year-old company with more than 500 customers, including Merrill Lynch, Prudential Financial and Motorola. The vendor’s SoftGrid software is used for application virtualization and the support of on-demand delivery of software, including patches and upgrades.

Microsoft will bring SoftGrid’s capabilities under its Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), which is a plan to create a management platform for Windows. The company has a three-tiered virtualization plan that covers servers, applications and system services. While the server strategy is nearly in full-flight, Microsoft has said nothing about application virtualization until last month and says it won’t dive into system service virtualization, which is designed to help hosted platforms, until after 2007.

SoftGrid, which includes a server and a client agent, lets users package applications into “containers,” store them on a server where they can be centrally managed and then stream those containers to desktops, devices, shared PCs while allowing users to open the application before the entire container is delivered. The applications are delivered as data files stored in a cache and are not converted to applications until the user clicks on an icon. The applications are not installed on the operating system but run in the container using the local PC resource. The container shields the application from conflicts with other installed applications and eliminates compatibility testing when rolling out new applications.

Softricity also plugs into the access controls and policy engine of Active Directory so IT can control access to applications and their individual features and store user preferences.

The approach makes possible a wide array of deployment, delivery and management savings, experts say, while taking advantage of local PC computing power and reducing individual desktop maintenance.

“Microsoft is the fat PC, fat application company, that is kind of its starting point,” says Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with Illuminata. “SoftGrid allows Microsoft to keep that very effective rich application, all of its functionality, the standard development tools, but infuse the manageability of the thin client.”

Thin client in favor

The thin client is again in favor fueled by Web services and the promise of centralized manageability. Technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (AJAX) are starting to bring the look-and-feel of desktop applications to browser-based clients.

While Microsoft is taking advantage of that with its .Net class of development tools, Softricity doesn’t require legacy applications to be rewritten, and the benefits on the management side are too great to ignore, experts say.