Smartphone Hypervisors
I viewed with interest recently the announcement that VMware had purchased Trango, a company specialising in hypervisors for smartphones.
The reason it interested me is that I’d heard about them for the first time only a few weeks before the announcement. Having read about what they and other companies in this field did I was starting to see the benefits of having a hypervisor in a smartphone. If we look at the industry at present, having recently purchased the new Iphone 3G, it’s easy to see why developing a software platform for a known hardware configuration ultimately leaves you with a more stable and high performance experience. Apple have built an entire business utilising this very stringent but successful means of delivering great products to market.
If we look at the alternatives we have Microsoft Mobile or Symbian OS’s trying to operate on numerous different hardware platforms with mixed results. I think this is where the hypervisor comes in to its own and provides great options for the mobile chip manufacturers / mobile phone manufacturers to make the job of the mobile phone OS providers and mobile application programmers easier. If there is a hypervisor layer which can standardise and simplify what is presented to software then compatibility becomes less of an issue. Mobile OS software becomes a whole lot easier to write and new mobile phones can be released to market a lot quicker. The need for extensive test and development is cut dramatically for both the handset manufacturer and the mobile OS manufacturers.
There are three main players in this market place at present, Trango, VirtualLogix and OKLabs. Interestingly of the three, only OKLabs actually has it’s hypervisor product in handsets that have actually been released to market. At the point VMWare bought Trango, they had yet to actually get their hypervisor into any smartphone handsets.
I’m interested to see which way VMware play it from here on in. Do they look to use their size and get a hold of the mobile hypervisor market while the other players are just small independents. Working to make licence sales to chip and handset manufacturers who can in turn improve time to market and OS integration within their own business areas. This would seem like a sensible area to get a foothold, I mean VMware have just made Trango the biggest fish in that particular pond. The expertise and knowledge gained from a foray into this market would only serve to underpin their VCloud vision.
One area you can almost guarantee they’ll be looking to utilise Trango in is within the VMware View universal client. Take your applications to any handheld device, regardless of it’s processor, regardless of any of it’s hardware. This will be an important area that will need to be addressed if the Cloud is really going to be what everyone wants it to be, freedom to move around, freedom to access what you want when you want from wherever you want.
I’m now waiting to see if Citrix, Cisco, Microsoft, Google or even Amazon make a similar play. You usually see at least a couple of them go down the same path, I also imagine buying up one of the other two companies in this particular secotr wouldn’t be that expensive a play to make.
