In October 2007 virtualization.info broke the news that Phoenix Technologies, the historical BIOS vendor, was working on its own hypervisor, HyperCore, and that the project involved Joanna Rutkwoska, the security researcher of Blue Pill fame.
In the following months Phoenix confirmed the news and provided additional details about the hypervisor architecture and the company strategy.
Rather than competing against VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and all the other vendors in this space to deliver the hypervisor on servers, Phoenix aims at the consumer market through the help of several kind of partners.
For example in February the company announced an agreement with SupportSoft to manage the HyperCore virtual machine that is dedicated to maintenance tasks (the so called ManageSpace).
Today Phoenix announces a major OEM agreement to deliver HyperCore in NEC notebooks.
The hypervisor will be used to deliver in the ManageSpace a transparent antivirus product which will protect Windows virtual machines in an automatic way.
In this way it will be much hardware for any malware to disable the antivirus engine. At the same time the users will not have to care about updating the definition file.
The announcement doesn’t reveal which NEC computers will be Hyper-Core powered, when and where this solution will be delivered and most of all what is the antivirus of choice.