Application Virtualization & Delivery
Applications and their installation, updating and maintenance are some of the greatest bottlenecks in current IT infrastructures. The great diversity of applications and their corresponding supporting middleware software applications regularly cause conflicts. These conflicts necessitate a time-consuming process of automated application deployment. Application virtualization prevents these disadvantages. Instead of physically installed applications, virtualized applications run in their own virtual environment, which sees only and use the layer directly below it (the operating system). With application virtualization, application conflicts do not occur anymore, so no time-consuming package processes are needed.
The assignment of applications is also still a struggle, especially with multiple locations or with open workplaces. Most application virtualization products also offer the possibility to stream the application to the user at the moment the application is started. This eliminates the need for the application to be available on the system.
Application Virtualisatie products examples are Microsoft App-V (formerly known as SoftGrid), Citrix XenApp Application Streaming and VMWare ThinApp.
