With a not too surprising move (rumors flew around for months) Microsoft just announced Kidaro acquisition.
The deal amount remains undisclosed but several sources are reporting a value around $100 million.
Kidaro is a US startup launched in October 2006 and focused on an almost empty segment of virtualization market: corporate virtual machines security.
Using the new, unique control level offered by virtualization, the company is able to wrap a VM in a security layer, enforcing corporate policies (virtual hard drives encryption, VM auto-delete on expiration time, quarantined access to unsecure networks, etc.) in a more efficient way than what any endpoint security solution could ever do.
The potential and the concrete value of this approach is enormous.
The only other companies offering similar solutions are VMware (with ACE) and Sentillion (with vThere).
Kidaro was the only one offering a virtualization agnostic product plus two fundamental capabilities that Microsoft can further enhance and leverage: the seamless window (just introduced with Windows Server 2008) and the VM image streaming (which could be combined with application streaming).
Microsoft plans to offer this technology only through the Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) like it’s already doing for Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid).
This acquisition greatly enriches the overall virtualization strategy (that is becoming more and more complex) demonstrating that besides server virtualization Microsoft has big plans for desktop virtualization as well.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.