Quoting from the 451 Group official announcement:
The 451 Group believes that virtualization is transforming the datacenter, and the next wave of virtualization technology will benefit desktops and applications. These improvements will lead to greater efficiency and power savings as this virtualization layer of software abstraction is added to the enterprise software infrastructure.
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The market has already seen $1.5bn in M&A activity related to desktop and application virtualization over the past 24 months, and 451 analysts predict that there is more to come…
It’s not hard to recognize huge interest vendors have for application virtualization: between 2006 and H1 2007 we assisted to major acquisitions operated market leaders like Microsoft (acquiring Softricity), Citrix (acquiring Ardence), Symantec (acquiring Altiris) and Google (acquiring GreenBorder).
Unfortunately The 451 Group analyzes together desktop and application virtualization technologies, which includes in analysts opinion also what we call today presentation or session virtualization (terminal services like technologies). Each of them follow very different approaches and have different class of challenges and impact on infrastructure. Customers should be very careful in evaluating all these technologies in the same way.