KACE is the very last company that entered the application virtualization market. It acquired Computers In Motion in September 2008 and released their rebranded technology this March as Virtual Kontainers.
Just before VMworld 2009 the company released Kontainers 2.0, which introduces some interesting features:
- a signature update service (customers can use it to inform KACE about new applications that don’t work properly in the virtual layer)
- the capability to patch/updated a virtual application without repackaging it
- a self-service provisioning web portal
- a command-line interface (CLI)
The first new feature is the most interesting.
KACE deserves credit for trying to solve one of the huge challenge in application virtualization adoption that 3rd party application support is. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter much how quick KACE is in supporting new applications inside Kontainers, for customers what really matters is the support that ISVs accept to guarantee for their applications inside Kontainers.
On top of that KACE has another problem: it doesn’t seem the company plans to release Kontainers as a stand-alone offering anytime soon.
The application virtualization platform is now part of the KACE’s flagship product, the KBOX management appliance, and this may severely limit its diffusion.
Customers need to have a simpler way to get the product if KACE wants a piece of the pie that Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Symantec and Novell (via XenoCode) are trying to eat.