VMWare has revealed that it has purchased CloudVolumes, a virtual desktop application service provider; terms of the transaction were not revealed.
CloudVolumes whose mission statement is to eliminate the need for per-VM management, installation or upgrades, is an existing VMWare partner and the deal, on the face of it, is a logical one.
"The combination of CloudVolumes and VMware Horizon will allow customers to build a real-time application delivery system that enables all applications to be centrally managed, always available and up-to-date, and delivered to virtualised environments for desktop, server or cloud on-demand," VMWare's senior vice president and general manager, desktop products, end-user computing, Sumit Dhawan said.
The secret sauce
But it is VMWare's CTO, Kit Colbert, who spills the beans and says why the acquisition made sense. CloudVolumes' key technology, he says, is layering "a method of decomposing a Windows instance into a set of discrete pieces".
It all boils down to the last mile virtualisation which allows CloudVolumes to avoid problems associated with installation-based delivery methods. Instead, CloudVolumes somehow managed to "ghost" its way into a system.
Applications can be delivered to a running, logged in desktop without the system administrators having to plan for downtime. No files are copied, no settings are changed and desktops no longer need to be powered on for applications to be managed.
