Is application virtualization a sensible investment for IT managers? Do the claimed benefits-and associated costs-of application virtualization outweigh current spending on regression testing, packaging and support costs currently associated with application problems that application virtualization is intended to replace? Or will these tools be subsumed into virtual desktop offerings? At their core, application virtualization products are designed to isolate applications from each other and the operating system. App/app separation is keeping two different products or two instances of the same product separate from each other. OS separation is the "sandboxing" of an application so that the application perceives that it is the only application installed on a single system. I subscribe to the idea that the primary driver of an IT product implementation should be that it significantly improves business processes. It has been shown that server virtualization dearly reduces costs by increasing server hardware utilization while also lessening the time needed to spin up new server instances. It seems plausible to me that application virtualization is riding the coattails of server virtualization without offering a corresponding business value.
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