Nobody wakes up thinking, “Hey, I sure could go for some virtualization today.”

In the enterprise it’s still all about the money -- reducing spend and increasing revenue. Physical & OS virtualization vendors have been very active with helping IT shops reduce their spending by consolidating hardware. When solving one problem typically new problems arise or old ones get worse and in this case lifecycle management costs have only increased. Therefore, application virtualization enters into the picture to de-couple your applications (new and old alike) from your OS & hardware infrastructure. This enables an enterprise to finally accelerate full standardization so that the infrastructure teams can more efficiently standardize their world & keep up with important changes (such as security threat patches) without affecting any of the applications that can run as independent manageable objects.

Now let’s cut through the application virtualization noise. “Application” in its own right is a big word that means different things to different people. At the end of the day it is in the customers benefit to look at this as broadly as possible since we now live in the age of services where applications are componentized so that the user gets the ultimate benefit --gaining the access to the functionality that they need when and where they need it.

The majority of vendors have been approaching desktop application virtualization by addressing the pain that exists with applications sprawled out on every personal computer. This is where the cost of deployment, patching and supporting each desktop has a very measurable pain. The data center server team has an advantage over the desktop team in that their machines can not be directly touched by the everyday users but they still deal with the cost of deployment/redeployment, patching/updating and monitoring, 99.99% availability, audit and compliance as well as ensuring the applications meet or exceed the services that the business requires to grow. In most industries if applications could be pro-actively controlled, millions of dollars could be added to the bottom-line with order fulfillment, higher customer service level achievement and a greater degree of company resource utilization.

In the enterprise solving deployment challenges around MS Windows Desktop applications is only one small part of the application scope. The world that delivers the greatest upside of not only lowered costs but most importantly line of business alignment is when all parts of all applications become discrete objects where the realization of on-demand computing can become a reality without starting from scratch and spending over 100 man years to get there.

In recent articles there have been firms trying to measure the impact of this industry segment. Now think to yourself where do application and application components run today? From the largest mainframes, mini-computers, blade servers, desktops, laptops, ATM machines, smart phones, DVR’s, gaming systems and embedded environments such as in cars and planes. Gaining control of applications on every level with application virtualization is clearly a multi-billion dollar market because that’s how widespread applications are. This is bigger than Windows or Linux because applications run in more than any one operating system. As one CTO said to me, “applications are not homogeneous we need something to enter the picture to decouple the application so that we can finally be as responsive to our business units as we owe it to them to be”.

It’s about time that the application gets to come first and the control gets handed back to all of us.