eWeek's Jeffrey Burt did a yeoman's job in pinning down a common understanding of virtualization in his 'Virtualization Vertigo' article a few weeks back. He pointed out, among other things, that server and storage virtualization vendors have recently been joined by I/O virtualization solutions. Add what AMD and Intel are planning on the processor level and the waters are getting very murky, very quickly.

Microsoft muddied the water in a big way two weeks ago when they announced their intention to buy Softricity, the desktop player in the 'virtual application' space. It seems the enterprise stack from top to bottom is now the target of virtualization solutions. As eWeek's Burt says, "as the benefits of virtualization - from greater data center flexibility to lower hardware, power and cooling costs - become more apparent, vendors are jumping in."

Trigence is all about increasing flexibility and reducing cost through virtualizing and moving applications. Unlike Microsoft/Softricity, our solution targets enterprise servers rather than the desktop. And unlike MS, we think the solution for 'greater data center flexibility' is not to stream applications to desktops, but rather move them between and among enterprise servers when, where and how you want.

By moving your applications safely and easily, servers can be retired, data centers consolidated, and as Jeffrey Burt says, flexibility ensues. But not only to reduce hardware operating costs as he suggests, but to bring flexibility to production environments rather than the develop/test labs where reports suggested 96% of virtualized server and OS solutions are ghetto-ized.

Focusing on the application, we think, helps clear the muddy waters of virtualization.