Microsoft confirms an App-V for Servers in the work

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In January 2008 virtualization.info highlighted how Microsoft indirectly announced the plan to bring its application virtualization technology (App-V, formerly SoftGrid) on servers.

At that time no mainstream news source recognized the groundbreaking news but a recent job announcement appeared on the Microsoft Career portal catalyzed the attention of CodenameWindows and Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet.

Do you want to be part of a great, growing team that will deliver technology that will change the way Microsoft and the industry deploy and execute software on the Windows platform? Join the Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) team and work on a new v1 product to bring the revolutionary Application Virtualization technology to a new market – the datacenter. Server Application Virtualization will effectively let any application be repackaged as an xcopyable application, making deployment vastly simpler and more reliable…

Foley inquired Microsoft to have a confirmation and they pointed her to our January article.

Microsoft acquired Softricity in 2006. It’s surprising that App-V is being ported in the data center after such a long time even if it’s evident that there are a number of technical challenges in this space.

Maybe the company didn’t consider the market mature enough to have server-side application virtualization. Maybe the original SoftGrid architecture was not designed to virtualize multi-tier backend services.
Whatever is the reason Microsoft is now getting concrete about this product, which may easily become the most important tool in its virtualization offering.