Microsoft strengthens virtualisation portfolio with Kidaro acquisition

In a move to strengthen its virtualisation portfolio, Microsoft said today that it intends to buy four-year-old Israeli virtualisation company Kidaro for an undisclosed sum..

Though Microsoft already has a product, Virtual PC, for desktop virtualisation, it is unmanaged. That makes it a hard sell to big businesses. Kidaro acts as a management infrastructure for Virtual PC, including a small client-based add-on that allows Virtual PCs to be managed.

“This fills a couple gaps with us,” Gavriella Schuster, senior director for Microsoft’s Windows product group, said in an interview.

Microsoft will add Kidaro’s desktop virtualisation capabilities into Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack (MDOP), a set of desktop management tools for businesses. The Kidaro technology would allow administrators to manage deployment, operation, and security of virtual desktops.

Businesses would typically use Kidaro with Virtual PC to access legacy applications that are no longer compatible with current operating systems. That way, businesses struggling with application compatibility in Windows Vista, for example, would gain a work-around.

Virtual PC can currently only be loaded in full, so that a user loading it up would see the full version of Windows 95 or some other operating system open inside a window. But Kidaro makes it possible to deliver only a single application that can be loaded like any other. “From an end-user perspective, our goal is so the user doesn’t have to know any of this,” Schuster said.

Kidaro is currently also able to manage VMWare virtual desktops, and while Microsoft said it will continue to be able to do so, it’s unclear whether that capability will continued to be developed since Microsoft’s intentions for Kidaro seem Windows-centric.

Schuster said that one of the main goals of Microsoft’s application and desktop virtualisation strategy is to push toward giving enterprise users access to their data wherever they are, even if they don’t have access to their own corporate laptop.

In that case, Kidaro also offers the capability to deliver a virtual image of an operating system via a USB key or a DVD, which would install the client and connect to the server-based management infrastructure upon being connected to the computer.

MDOP, which is only available to volume licensees through Microsoft’s Software Assurance license, includes an asset inventory service, group policy management, diagnostics and recovery tools, error monitoring, and application virtualisation capabilities. Microsoft’s other desktop and app virtualisation tools include Terminal Services and Microsoft Application Virtualisation, formerly known as SoftGrid.

Israeli business journal Globes reported that Microsoft is purchasing Kidaro for US$100 million, but Microsoft didn’t detail the terms of the deal. Kidaro is the second Israeli start-up Microsoft has bought in weeks, following up on the purchase of ad-targeting company YaData late last month.