VMware on Monday announced plans to bring virtualization to mobile phones through its new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP).
Built on technology it acquired from Trango Virtual Processors in October, VMware MVP aims to help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster. What’s more, end users will be able to run multiple profiles — for example, one for personal use and one for work use — on the same phone.
“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,” said Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware. “We look forward to working closely with our partners to bring new mobile solutions to market faster.”
Reducing Time to Market
VMware describes MVP as a thin layer of software that can be embedded on a mobile phone to decouple the applications and data from the underlying hardware. The company says MVP will be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones.
One of the key benefits to handset vendors is reducing the time to market. Vendors spend significant time and effort getting new phones to market because they are dealing with multiple chipsets, operating systems, and device drivers across their product families. For example, the same software stack doesn’t work across all phones and, therefore, must be ported separately for each platform — a slow and expensive process.
VMware MVP aims to quicken time to market by virtualizing the hardware, enabling handset vendors to develop a software stack with an operating system and a set of applications that is not tied to the underlying hardware. At the same time, by isolating the device drivers from the…