Symantec buys AppStream, but what took so long?

Yesterday, Symantec announced its acquisition of application streaming specialist AppStream, one full year after buying AppStream's long-time partner, application virtualization vendor Altiris. So what kept AppStream waiting?

"I'm just surprised that Symantec didn't acquire AppStream earlier -- or that Altiris didn't do so even before that," said Brian Madden, president and technical analyst at The Brian Madden Company, during an interview Thursday with BetaNews.

Obtained for an undisclosed sum, AppStream will now join Altiris in a new Symantec business unit known as Endpoint Virtualization which will accompany Symantec's existing Endpoint Security unit.

Microsoft's addition of new features to Windows Vista, including new support for its own app virtualization system SoftGrid, has sent third-party vendors scrambling for new ways of positioning themselves. Security software maven Symantec has decided -- after about a year's pause -- to move ahead with virtualization within an expanded focus of data management.

Application virtualization is just one aspect; it enables just a single app to run mainly on a host outside the client where the user interacts with that application. Essentially, an app no longer has to be installed on a client to be used from that client; and if it's done right, the user never knows the difference.

But virtualization as a product category is complicated, and covers a lot of different ground. There's also operating system virtualization, where a a guest operating system runs within a virtual machine (VM). In recent years, both Intel and AMD have been building on-chip support for OS virtualization onto their CPUs.

And you can branch out OS virtualization in two directions: native virtualization, in which the VM simulates just enough of the hardware to allow operation of an unmodified OS in isolation; and paravirtualization, where the VM provides a special API that running applications can contact, so that they "know" they're running in a virtual machine.

CLARIFICATION Then there is OS-level virtualization, which is not to be confused with "OS virtualization." Here, a group of separate operating partitions is created, and then assigned to the OS to manage. But AppStream's virtualization is on the other side of this map.

"Application virtualization lets you run the application on any device. But application streaming helps you to get the application from the server to the client," Madden told BetaNews.

The streaming portion of virtualization is AppStream's specialty. On its own, Altiris' SVS (Software Virtualization Solution) allows for remote administration of virtualized applications, including permission rights. But it doesn't incorporate application streaming, Madden said.

There are other ways, too, of distributing applications with our without virtualization -- Microsoft Terminal Services comes to mind. "But most of the people who have bought Altiris software have also gotten AppStream licenses," the analyst observed. So many customers may find they already have the capability to go a few steps further than Terminal Services.

Rivalry is really heating up right now in the application virtualization market, according to Madden. Contendors against Symantec will include Citrix, with its recently acquired XenSource; VMWare, a company that recently bought Thinstall; and Microsoft itself, now the owner of Softricity and the publisher of SoftGrid.

Yet among all of Symantec's competitors in this space, application virtualization is already integrated with application streaming, Madden said.

So what did take Symantec so long, anyway? Maybe Symantec wasn't quite ready to launch products into this emerging arena.

"My sense is that Symantec needed to figure out what to do with [application virtualization]. Until now, Altiris has been kind of off by itself at Symantec. At this point, Altiris and AppStream will turn into Endpoint Virtualization. But Symantec will probably still let [its new product line-up] run on its own for a while," the virtualization analyst told BetaNews.