VMware Brings Virtualization to Mobile Phones, Enabling a Host of Benefits for Handset Vendors By VSM News Staff published: Monday, November 10 2008
Faster Time to Market, Better Security, Isolated Work and Personal Usage Are
Among Benefits Virtualization Enables for Mobile Phones.
PALO ALTO, Calif., November 10, 2008 - VMware,
Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions
from the desktop to the datacenter, today
announced plans to bring virtualization and its many proven benefits to mobile
phones through the new VMware Mobile
Virtualization Platform (MVP). Built on innovative technology acquired from
Trango Virtual Processors in October 2008, VMware MVP will help handset vendors
reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to
market faster. In addition, end users will benefit too by being able to run
multiple profiles - for example, one for personal use and one for work use - on the same phone.
"VMware is excited to extend the benefits of virtualization,
which we pioneered for x86 hardware, to the mobile phone market," said Paul
Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware.
"By abstracting the applications and data from the hardware itself, virtualization
not only enables handset vendors to accelerate time to market but can also pave
the way for innovative applications and services for phone users. We look
forward to working closely with our
partners to bring new mobile solutions to market faster."
"Gartner sees virtualization in
the mobile space as a very promising and fast emerging market," said Monica
Basso, mobile analyst at Gartner. "We
predict that by 2012, more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be
virtualized. Virtualization will enable enterprises and
consumers to easily manage and secure their phones and it will also help
handset vendors reduce bills of materials and shorten development cycles to
allow for faster releases."
"There is a
rapid and growing demand for virtualization technologies from both the
designers and consumers of next-generation mobile devices utilizing the ARM®
CortexTM-A8 and Cortex-A9 processors," said Eric Schorn, vice president, marketing,
processors division, at ARM. "Offering both time to market benefits for system
integration and enhanced end-user experiences, we look forward to continuing to
work closely with VMware as we enhance our support for
virtualization."
What is VMware MVP?
VMware MVP is a thin
layer of software embedded on a mobile phone that decouples the applications
and data from the underlying hardware. It is optimized to run efficiently on
low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones. The MVP enables handset
vendors to bring phones to market faster and make them easier to manage.
Benefits to Handset Manufacturers
- Accelerated time to market:
Today, handset vendors spend significant time and effort
getting new phones to market due to the use of multiple chipsets, operating
systems and device drivers across their product families. The same software
stack does not work across all the
phones and, therefore, must be ported separately for each platform. This
process is slow and expensive and ultimately slows time to market. VMware MVP
virtualizes the hardware, enabling handset vendors to develop a software stack
with an operating system and a set of applications that is not tied to the
underlying hardware. This enables the vendors to deploy the same software stack
on a wide variety of phones without worrying about the underlying hardware
differences. At the same time, by isolating the device drivers from the
operating system, handset vendors can further reduce porting costs because they
can now use the same drivers irrespective of the operating system deployed on
the phone.
- Easy Migration to Rich Operating Systems:
Increasingly, handset vendors and carriers are looking to migrate
from proprietary operating systems to rich, open operating systems to
enable their customers to access the widest selection of applications. With
this transition to open operating systems, protection of trusted services
such as digital rights management, authentication, billing, etc. is
becoming an increasing concern. VMware MVP allows vendors to isolate these
important trusted services from the open operating system and run them in
isolated and tamper-proof virtual machines so that even if the open
environment is compromised, the trusted services are not impacted.
Benefits to Businesses and End Users
Companies are under increasing pressure from employees
to support employee-owned mobile devices. Choice, however, brings with it
complexity in managing a wide variety of devices in terms of both cost and
security. It also brings increased risk in securing and managing employee-owned
devices, especially if they contain confidential information. VMware MVP will
allow IT organizations to deploy a corporate phone personality that can run
alongside the employee's personal phone on the same physical device.
Smart phones are quickly becoming a combination of a PC
and a wallet rolled into one package. A person's phone persona - an individuals'
collection of applications, pictures, videos, music, emails, bank info, credit
card information, PIM, etc. - is becoming much richer and more valuable. Consequently,
the ability to protect and migrate personas will become an important purchasing
decision. VMware MVP saves the
persona as a set of files so that all the applications and data on the phone can
be managed as a collection of files. People can then easily move their persona
to a new device making the upgrade to a new phone virtually painless.
Visit www.vmware.com/mobile
for additional information about VMware
Mobile Virtualization Platform.
About VMware
VMware (NYSE: VMW) is the global leader in virtualization solutions from the
desktop to the datacenter. Customers of
all sizes rely on VMware to reduce
capital and operating expenses, ensure business continuity, strengthen security
and go green. With 2007 revenues of $1.3 billion, more than 120,000 customers
and more than 20,000 partners, VMware is one of the fastest growing public
software companies. Headquartered in Palo
Alto, California, VMware is majority-owned by EMC Corporation (NYSE:
EMC). For more
information, visit www.vmware.com.
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