Software management and virtualization vendor Altiris last week released software to help corporations ease rollouts of virtualized applications and manage desktops better.

Wise Package Studio 7.0 is software for turning an .msi application installation file into a form that can be executed in a virtualized environment on a desktop PC.

The Wise software has been integrated with Altiris' Software Virtualization Solution (SVS), a client agent that adds virtualization capabilities to desktops. SVS isolates such things as an application's files and registry settings from the underlying operating system even as the application runs normally. Earlier this month, Altiris released an upgrade to SVS to support the integration with Wise.

"Where Wise 7 comes into play for us is that we can take the 100 applications we have spent two years packaging and standardizing, and bring them into Wise and see how quickly we can turn those packages over to virtualized applications," says Matt Giblin, senior desktop engineer for Mercy Health Systems in Baltimore. "Once we do that, we can say we have virtualized our desktops."

Giblin says virtualization provides a clean way to manage and upgrade desktops because he avoids application conflicts over shared document link libraries, doesn't require uninstall scripts to remove applications, quickly rolls back damaged applications to a known stable state and upgrades application packages after testing them in the lab.

"Our turnaround times are decreased and we don't have a lot of [management] issues because we are not deleting files," Giblin says.

In addition to converting 100 applications to the Wise/SVS model, Giblin is testing a special, virtualized Internet Explorer that would run in its own environment, minimizing the browser's security risks for the desktop.

Mercy Health also is considering using the virtualization technology to support a roaming profile for users. With the two pieces of software, users package up their applications; store them as files on client machines; and activate, deactivate and update those applications in a centralized and managed fashion.

The SVS software works on its own or as an integrated component of the Altiris Client Management Suite, which competes with products from CA, LANDesk and Microsoft. SVS competes with similar technology from Softricity, which was recently acquired by Microsoft.