Ronni Colville, a vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner, was more upbeat. She said application virtualization, while it doesn't get as much attention as other virtualization technologies, could be significant in the near term. Gartner predicts that 50 percent of large businesses will use application virtualization by 2010.

ThinApp will compete with Microsoft's Application Virtualization software, formerly called SoftGrid, which it acquired when it bought Softricity. Rose and Colville both noted that the Microsoft product is available only to customers who sign up for its Software Assurance licensing program, which will limit its appeal.

In addition, the Microsoft software, along with a comparable product from Citrix, both require a greater investment in server software before customers can use them, the analysts said. ThinApp can be used independently of other VMware products, and it works with existing PC management tools from BMC Software, Avocent/LANDesk and others.

In the future, VMware could potentially combine elements of ThinApp with its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product, Colville said. VDI is for a different form of virtualization, in which a desktop image is hosted on a server and accessed remotely by end users.

These hosted desktops tend to be "all or nothing," Colville said, with a large software configuration being streamed over the network. The ThinApp technology could allow VMware to deliver discrete parts of the desktop image wrapped in "virtual bubbles," which could make the delivery more nimble, she said.

Client licenses for ThinApp 4 are priced at $39 per desktop, Chen said. Customers will also need the ThinApp Virtualization Suite, for packaging applications, which is priced at $5,000 and includes 50 client licenses. Rose said Thinstall customers he spoke to told him that packaging applications for delivery with ThinApp is relatively easy.

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