So far application virtualization vendors had a hard time to win the market. Even the biggest players like Microsoft, VMware and Symantec have been extremely slow in developing their platforms and the marketing effort to push them to the mainstream audience has been practically non-existent.
There’s even a doubt that the market really needs application virtualization.
Despite that, there are new players brave enough to enter the market.
The last one is a German firm called Dögel IT-Management.
Dögel IT-Management is a solution provider focused on desktop management and application virtualization, currently offering the solutions of most of its future competitors: VMware, XenoCode (now renamed in Spoon), InstallFree and Endeavors Technologies (recently resurrected with a new Chairman).
There is not much more about the company, founded in 2005, except that its founder and CEO is Mathias Dögel. He released an interview explaining the desire to enter the application virtualization market to fix the many shortcomings of the solutions above.
Two weeks ago, the company launched a public tech preview of its new application virtualization engine called Evalaze.
Like some competitors, Evalaze 0.8 creates a sandbox in the Windows operating system and performs file system and Registry redirection.
Quite interestingly, the company claims the capability to virtualized multiple version of Internet Explorer, including 6, 7, 8 and the technical preview of 9, which is not a trivial goal to accomplish.
The virtualized applications run in user-mode and work on all Windows client OSes, from 2000 to 7.
Evalaze is even able to execute 16bit apps on 32bit OSes and 32bit apps on 64bit OSes.
Additionally, the splash screen that appears when you launch a virtualized application can be customized.
The virtualized applications are packaged after taking a snapshot of a clean environment:
Similarly to Spoon, the company released a bunch of free and open source applications virtualized with the new engine that customers can download for free.
Dögel IT-Management has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.