VMware takes virtualisation to smartphones

With the world steadily adopting smartphones for both work and pleasure, VMware has found a way for both the personal and the corporate side to co-exist on the same phone.

Shrinivas Krishnamurti, VMware’s Director of Product Management and Market Development, says the changing landscape of the mobile phone market prompted the company to look at the issues facing the corporate marketplace.

Krishnamurti says the company has been talking to CIOs and what they’re hearing is that employee’s want to use their own smartphones at work.

But security issues prevent this from happening, resulting in employee’s having a smartphone for work and a smartphone for personal use.

The solution to this problem was virtualising smartphones, he says.

To do this, VMware, pioneers of virtualisation, had to develop a hypervisor, an internal piece of hardware that allows a smartphone to have multiple “identities” – one for work and one for play, he says.

The next part of the puzzle was developing software to manage and secure the ‘work’ phone.

With both of these solutions in place, VMware is now looking to take the product to market.

The company is looking at launching in three distinct territories – North America, Europe and Australia/New Zealand, he says.

It will be working with to work with a single major telecommunications in each territory in relation to the hypervisor hardware.

The company is in discussions with one of New Zealand’s major telecommunication companies which should see the first virtualised smartphones on the local market by 2011, however, Krishnamurti declined to announce names at this stage.

In regards to the software management application, there is two different means of getting to market – via the telco as part of an end-to-end solution, or through the more traditional channel space, whereby VMware will work with partners to tailor software management solutions for the end user.

With smartphone numbers set to eclipse PC’s by 2014 according to IDC statistics, Krishnamurti says finding the right work to home balance for smartphone use will dramatically increase in importance.

“This is a real and growing issue, and companies want to do whatever they can to help employees that want to bring their smartphones to work.”