VMware today announced plans to bring virtualization to mobile phones through the new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), reports The New York Times and plenty of others. Built on innovative technology acquired from Trango Virtual Processors in October 2008, VMware MVP should help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster. In addition, end users will benefit by being able to run multiple profiles – for example, one for personal use and one for work use – on the same phone.
We didn’t know about the acquisition of Trango VP, but we did write about the company before.
“VMware is excited to extend the benefits of virtualization, which we pioneered for x86 hardware, to the mobile phone market,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “By abstracting the applications and data from the hardware itself, we expect that virtualization will not only enable handset vendors to accelerate time to market but can also pave the way for innovative applications and services for phone users. We look forward to working closely with our partners to bring new mobile solutions to market faster.”
VMware MVP is a thin layer of software that will be embedded on a mobile phone that decouples the applications and data from the underlying hardware. It will be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones. The MVP is planned to enable handset vendors to bring phones to market faster and make them easier to manage.
As NYTimes writes:
You can bet that Intel, an investor in VMware, will back the technology. The chip maker has a new line of mobile device processors sold under the Atom brand.