News
VMware Acquires Trango, Brings Virtualization to Telecom Market
- By Tom Valovic
- November 10, 2008
Virtualization market leader VMware Inc. today announced a new market direction
involving the mobile telecom market. VMware will target mobile phone makers
and their partners with a new bare-metal hypervisor optimized for telecom applications.
The new product has been developed through the acquisition last month of Trango
Virtual Processors, based in Grenoble, France.
The new hypervisor has been rebranded as VMware's Mobile Virtualization Platform
(MVP) and targets an emerging growth market. Market researcher Gartner has predicted
that by 2012, over half of all smartphones being shipped by suppliers will be
virtualized.
Although still being evaluated by mobile handset vendors and not yet generally
available, VMware MVP will eventually be embedded in mobile phones where it
will perform many of the same tasks that the company's ESX virtualization software
does today for servers. This includes decoupling applications and data from
the device itself as well as the OS.
Currently, there are some memory and power constraints for virtualizing mobile
devices. However, according to Srinivas Krishnamurti, director of product management
and market development for VMware, "We don't believe that hardware is going
to be a growth lock for virtualization."
VMware is touting a number of benefits for both mobile phone vendors and subscribers.
Benefits for vendors include a reduction in product development time because
currently, software stacks will not work across different phones and must be
ported separately.
In addition, subscribers to carrier mobile services would gain the ability
to have a "persona" -- consisting of profiles, applications and data
-- untethered from a specific device when upgraded or replaced. Using this approach,
for example, a business directory and personal directory could be instantiated
on the same phone, facilitating the trend toward employee-owned mobile phones.
Although the market is still nascent and no separate business unit has been
established by VMware, the announcement can be seen as another interesting competitive
move by the company. Neither Citrix nor Microsoft have similar initiatives underway,
although a company called VirtuaLogix currently offers many similar capabilities.