VMware acquires desktop management company Wanova

VMware basically owns the x86 server virtualization right now, but that hasn’t stopped Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and others from trying to gain momentum and take away market share from the virtualization giant. Despite VMware’s strong grip on the server side, it has yet to find a way to achieve that same level of success within the desktop virtualization market.

After an exciting week at Citrix Synergy 2012 in San Francisco earlier this month, Citrix seemed to gain even more momentum and possibly pulled further ahead of VMware as it showcased upcoming technologies that will provide the company with an even better-defined story for transforming the corporate desktop. But now, less than two weeks later, VMware strikes back with the announcement that it plans to acquire Silicon Valley-based Wanova, adding a significant piece of technology to its end-user computing (EUC) portfolio. From a competitive standpoint, this acquisition will give VMware features and capabilities that begin to level the playing field with Citrix.

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Wanova, a maker of desktop management and layering software, was founded back in 2007 by Dr. Issy Ben-Shaul and Ilan Kessler. The two previously worked together to build WAN services firm Actona (later acquired by Cisco), which developed a WAN optimization product that later became the foundation of the Cisco Application Delivery business unit. It was this expertise in wide area networking and the ability to optimize the movement of data over a WAN that gave the company the credibility to start Wanova.

The company exited stealth mode in August 2009 after raising $13 million in a Series A round of funding from Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures, and Opus Capital. It then raised another $10 million in a Series B round last August from the same three venture capitalist firms.

Neither VMware nor Wanova representatives have divulged the financial terms of the acquisition deal, but a spokesperson for VMware said the deal is expected to close sometime in the second quarter. They added that all 50 employees at Wanova, including the company’s founders, are expected to move to VMware once the acquisition closes.

Wanova’s flagship product that interested VMware is called Mirage. It centralizes image management by using the company’s layering technology in the data center. It is this layering technology that allows administrators to separate the management and delivery of images. The images of the endpoints are cloned into the data center to enable the benefits of centralized management and recovery while leaving cached copies of the image on each endpoint for local (and offline) execution. Mirage decouples the image into individual layers that can be managed, delivered, and restored independently from each other to offer increased flexibility. Those logical layers include the operating system, corporate/departmental-installed applications, user-installed applications, and user data and settings.

“Wanova Mirage is an innovative image replication and layering technology that combines sophisticated, layered image management with client-side execution and persistent caching,” said Scott Davis, CTO of VMware’s End User Computing group. “It was designed to centralize the management of desktop images in the data center and to deliver those images efficiently to physical Windows systems for a native user experience, as well as to virtual machines for execution.”

Both View and Mirage provide centralized desktop image management, with certain advantages, such as making it easier to deploy and install updates and patches. The key difference in these two technologies that needs to be understood, according to Davis, is that “VMware View images execute on servers in the data center and use a remote graphics protocol for the user interface, while Wanova Mirage images are transmitted and cached locally for runtime execution on the client systems,” making Mirage well-suited for executing managed images on disconnected laptops, including MacBooks running VMware Fusion.

The acquisition therefore addresses two major limitations of VMware View: the inability to manage physical desktops and the problems caused by user-installed applications. Mirage fills both of these gaps. Since physical desktops aren’t going anywhere for a while, this technology will allow VMware to provide more conservative IT shops a way to slowly ease their way into a VMware View VDI environment.

Wanova adds a proven set of new services to VMware’s End User Computing, including snapshot-based backup with fast restore, remote break-fix, persona-preserving single image management, zero-touch OS migration, mass hardware refresh, and file-access portal for mobile devices — for both virtual and physical endpoints.

“Wanova Mirage broadens our EUC offerings by bringing many of the operational and centralized management benefits associated with VMware View to laptops and physical systems,” said Davis. “This means both native user experience through local execution and disconnected access.”

According to Davis, “As Windows evolves into a runtime environment for Windows applications delivered from the cloud, the Wanova Mirage technology presents a great building block for delivering Windows Applications as a Service through VMware Horizon and enabling managed service provider offerings from the cloud.”

Horizon, remember, is VMware’s platform for the post-PC era, extending IT control to the cloud while providing a new way to work for end-users. The Horizon Application Manager unifies the management of any software-as-a-service (SaaS), Web, and Windows applications through a catalog, and securely delivers the applications to end-users on the device of their choice.

There are many trends in the industry pushing organizations to examine their current desktop policies: the end of Windows XP support, the constant refresh cycle of hardware and operating system upgrades, the need to support disaster recovery, work-from-home or remote employees, and the increased use of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives. VMware is but one company trying to efficiently and effectively address this challenge.

Until the acquisition of Wanova officially closes, VMware isn’t giving away its secrets as to exactly how this new technology will fit within its existing EUC technology stack. You can bet this will be a hot topic of discussion at the company’s upcoming VMworld user conference taking place at the end of August in San Francisco.

Some in the industry have begun questioning what this acquisition will mean for companies like Unidesk, which has competing technology with Wanova and partners with VMware. If they aren’t gobbled up by a competitor like Citrix before VMworld, you can bet this will be another topic for discussion at the world’s largest virtualization trade show event.

In the end, perhaps the biggest question will be whether VMware actually stitches View and Mirage together to form a cohesive solution. And if so, how long will it take? Combining applications developed in-house with those gained through acquisition is almost never an easy thing.

VMworld, here we come!

This article, “VMware acquires desktop management company Wanova,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.