Mike DiPetrillo's Blog

Yesterday, VMware announced that they were buying Trango. Trango makes virtualization solutions for the mobile phone or other embedded devices. Now why would VMware do this? Well, if you were at VMworld then you heard all about VMware View. Basically it's the thought that once you put an app on top of a virtualization layer then the layer actually stretches all the way down to the end device so you don't have to worry about which app works with what. This is really key when you start looking out at cloud.

Cloud is just the middle glue that gets the user to the data. In order for that to work you really need a layer on every possible device that the user could come from. VMware had most of the bases covered already since it's been in the client virtualization game since the very beginning in 1998. The one missing piece was the cell phone and other embedded devices like set-top boxes.

The play is nice for those in the embedded industry. That industry stretches from the obvious (phones and set-top boxes) to the not so obvious (control systems in most automobiles or on-board missile guidance systems). The real pain the these devices is keeping up with the change in processors, applications, and operating systems. Let's say you're cruising along and developing an app for the iPhone. All of a sudden Apple makes someone mad and you get rid of all of the iPhones and go with Blackberries. What do you do with that app? Even worse is when you're someone like Motorola who has hundreds of set-top boxes and all of them have different architectures. How do you write one app to run across all of these systems?

What this acquisition does is give VMware the keys to the kingdom. They're now in a position where you can deploy your app on VMware View and know that it can truly get to any device in any location at any time. It also opens a whole new slew of customers to go after in a space where there really aren't many competitors. It will definitely be interesting to see how this pans out.