The application virtualization startup Trigence doesn’t exist anymore. Starting this month the company is called AppZero and has a completely new market strategy.
At launch time, Trigence was the only vendor in its market segment to offer an application virtualization solution for Linux and not for Windows.
To fill the gap, in just one month the company hired two former Softricity executives, as Vice President of US Sales and Chief Operating Officer.
The latter remained at Trigence for just one year and after just three months the company also lost its President and CEO.
In over one year (from June 2007 to September 2008) Trigence could only release a single, minor update for its platform, which didn’t help to make it more relevant.
Now the company, or what is left of it, announces a new corporate identity (AppZero), a new product name (Virtual Application Appliance or VAA) and a new CEO (Greg O’Connor, who was previously the founder of Sonic Software and pioneer of the Enterprise Service Bus, the foundation of Service-Oriented Architecture).
VAA is billed as a new product suite available for Windows, Solaris and Linux, and made of three different tools: Creator (the VAA editor), Director (the actual application virtualization platform) and Administrator (the VAA centralized management tool).
But after a deep inspection of the virtual applications available for free, it’s easy to recognize the five months-old Trigence AE 3.2 engine.
The real news is in the message: AppZero virtualizes server-side, mission-critical applications, across all tiers.
Which is a pretty hasty statement, considering that so far no company in the application virtualization space tried to virtualize back-end services.
Even Microsoft, the only one that is reportedly working on this, it’s taking a lot of time to release such offering.
Beyond the technical issues, AppZero has to demonstrate it can win ISVs support.
The company claims partnerships with Microsoft, VMware, Red Hat, Novell, Sun, IBM and HP, but doesn’t expose a list of server applications that are officially supported on its platform.
Trigence is not the first virtualization company that relaunched its brand identity in the virtualization space: InovaWave changed its name in Hyper9 in February 2008, Reflex Security changed its name in Reflex Systems in November 2008.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.