VMware ThinApp Blog

If you are attending VMworld 2010 in San Francisco today, you’ll hear Paul Maritz and Steve Herrod detail our vision for the future of IT. For the end-user, the future we see centers around the idea of delivering a consumer cloud computing experience within the enterprise while maintaining corporate policy, flexible service delivery at lower costs (read more about our strategy in today’s announcement).

But before we achieve that vision, we have some work to do. A key first step is to enable IT organizations to modernize their existing desktop architecture.  Modernization of the desktop environment enables organizations to evolve from a device-centric world to a more modern, user-centric model where users can flexibility access their applications and data from any device while providing IT with greater control to deliver increased efficiencies. You can learn more about how our new release of VMware View (View 4.5) modernizes the desktop in our View Blog.

Thanks to Cloud Computing the future of end-user computing is shifting away from the traditional desktop.  The future will be about the secure delivery of applications anywhere, anytime and on any device type. Whether it’s a desktop application, Software as a Service (SaaS) application or native to the iPhone/iPad or Android app won’t matter.  What matters is that you as the user will be able to access the tools you need from the device you have at the moment.

To cope with the new technology landscape, many IT organizations have already embraced the paradigm shift by modernizing their entire desktop environment. The persuasive argument for most is the ability to centralize control, simplify management, control costs and better deliver IT service to the end users. In this environment, both the desktop and the applications are virtualized. Virtualization provides IT and end users an abstraction layer that isolates the applications and the desktops from the operating environment. A virtualized application is much more predictable in its behavior as it does not interact with the underlying operating system.

With VMware ThinApp, applications can be made aware of each other but run completely isolated from each other. This allows for multiple applications or multiple versions of the same application to be run on the same environment without any conflict. For the system administrator, there is no installation required, there is a single image to manage, .EXE or .MSI, for each application, not a myriad of files. This single image executable can be deployed on a variety of the Windows operating environment allowing IT to dynamically meet the application access demands of the mobile workforce. With no agent code required on the end point devices, VMware ThinApp packaged applications give users the full mobility and flexibility they need to be productive anywhere.

Pragmatically, does the paradigm shift bring a worry-free era of centralized management and control in the datacenter and better delivery and access to computing resources and applications? Not exactly. This technology change is an evolution, not a revolution. While there is no panacea to achieve user-centric computing over night, we need the technology today to bridge the gap between legacy and leading edge, between legacy applications and end user computing services.

Over the years, businesses spent millions of hours and same in money encoding their business practices into custom software applications to automate the business process, from an order entry system to a supply chain application to patient’s records and hospital delivery tracking system. All these legacy applications continue to drive real and significant revenue for many enterprises today. For IT to evolve how we deliver these legacy applications as services to users, we need to be able to move these legacy business applications to the new operating environment. This translates to a potential massive application migration wave.

Take Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE 6) as one example. Even though its end of life is declared, IE 6 is still the second most used browser version in enterprises to date. Many internet and intranet business applications are still running on this browser version. The dilemma for IT is that IE 6 does not run natively on Windows 7, keeping these applications around means having to maintain both legacy hardware and software. Porting these applications means disruption to the business and a substantial investment cost in recoding them in many cases.

The solution? Transform these existing applications such that the business logic is preserved and they can be used in the new environment in a cost effective way. Many IT organizations are looking to application virtualization to extend the life of these legacy IE 6 applications. VMware ThinApp 4.6 provides an easy way to virtualize these IE6 applications along with their custom ActiveX controls for deployment on Windows 7. A virtualized IE 6 application can run seamlessly alongside a natively installed newer version of IE on the same system. For IT, virtualizing IE6 or any other custom legacy application is effectively bridging the old with the new, preserving the domain expertise encoded in the custom applications and continue to serve up business services ­to end users or be pulled down to a handheld device.

In addition to the IE 6-based web applications, there are thousands of custom applications in existence. Manually virtualizing these applications is also not a cost effective way to transform applications into services. To do this, there needs to be an automated mechanism to convert these traditional applications with .MSI files to virtualized applications. VMware ThinApp Converter works with ESX, vSphere and Workstation images to automatically convert silently-installed applications into ThinApp packages.

Custom business applications are investments and require long term commitment. Unlike hardware, applications are not easily swapped out for a “newer” model. In many businesses, applications upgraded to a newer version require, in addition to lengthy regression testing, business specific requirements of certification, particularly for healthcare and applications deployed in the government sector and commitment from the helpdesk team for ongoing support. For IT the transition to user-centric computing must also include the solution to transform existing legacy applications into services while preserving the current investment.

For more information on ThinApp 4.6 go to: http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/

Download Free Trial of VMware ThinApp for 60 days: http://www.vmware.com/go/trythinapp