Just yesterday virtualization.info published the news about a possible acqusition of VMware in the application virtualization market, speculating that the acquired firm could be FastScale.
The official announcement comes today, clarifing the actual acquired company and the company strategy behind the move:
VMware, Inc. , the virtualization software leader, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Thinstall, a privately-held application virtualization software company headquartered in San Francisco. VMware is acquiring Thinstall to expand its desktop virtualization capabilities which help customers better provision, deploy and update desktop environments. The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed in the current fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed…
The acquisition of Thinstall and its use for VDI scenarios extended the competition front with Microsoft (which acquired Softricity application vendor in June 2006) and Citrix, and brings the company a notable set of OEM partnerships: with LANDesk (March 2007), with Provision Networks (July 2007), with BMC (September 2007) and with Macrovision (October 2007).
Given the strong focus of Thinstall on Microsoft platforms, the acquisition seems to validate an important point, often emerging in surveys: large majority of virtual machines contains Windows guest OSes.
At the same time this acquition validates once and forever the fact that application virtualization is considered one of the next mainstream technology for most major players: before VMware, Microsoft acquired Softricity, Citrix acquired Ardence, Symantec acquired Altiris and even Google acquired GreenBorder.
Thinstall is the 7th acquisition for VMware. Before it the virtualization player acquired Akimbi (June 2006), Propero (April 2007), Determina (August 2007), Dunes Technologies (September 2007), Sciant (October 2007) and Foedus (January 2008).
If the trend continues VMware will acquire a new company per month.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.