VMWare purchases Thinstall

One of the challenges that Thinstall has had in the market place has been the classic small company problem. How can a small company provide assurance to large customers that it will be there in the future. Well that concern went away yesterday with its purchase by VMWare.

Most of the reporting is just restating the news release. There has been some commentary though.

Randall Kennedy of Infoworld:

Some might see the acquisition as a “tasty morsel,” a way for VMware to expand into the nascent Application Virtualization space by purchasing a smaller (20+ people at last count) player with an outsized presence in the market. I, on the other hand, see a potential “hairball” in the making.

Not surprisingly from VMware’s Warren Ponder:

For years now customers and IT visionaries have been planning their next generation desktop architectures. IT organizations have been stepping outside the traditional way of deploying desktop services and regaining the control of their desktop environments by leveraging the power and benefits of VMware virtualization technology. Where server based computing solutions such as Citrix and Terminal services have allen short, VMware VDI has been able to step in and revive the promise of server based computing and dynamic desktop environments.

Brian Madden:

The most obvious place for Thinstall in VMware’s solution stack is for use with their Windows XP and Windows Vista desktop delivery products, including their VDI solutions for server-based computing scenarios and VMware ACE for local computing scenarios. Thinstall is great here because the more apps you package with Thinstall, the less you have to build into your base Windows disk image that your desktop users will use.

From a personal perspective, VMWare is one of the few companies that could have purchased Thinstall and still given it the potential to remain within the mainstream. VMWare is a trusted middleware organisation and Thinstall would fit in as an extension to existing capabilities. If, however, Thinstall retreats into the VDI stack then it’s of limited applicability.