Microsoft’s acquisition of virtualisation specialist Kidaro will be its second such purchase this year, following that of Calista Technologies in January. The move shows that the software giant is increasingly serious about the benefits of virtualisation, both on the desktop and in the server consolidation arena where the technology is already well established.

Announced in mid-March, the acquisition is expected to be completed within the next 30 days, according to Microsoft. It will bring some key capabilities the firm can offer to enterprise customers, including the ability to deploy and manage virtual machines across many client systems. This will help with application compatibility, mobility and business continuity, especially when it comes to aiding businesses migrating to Windows Vista.

“Kidaro’s desktop virtualisation technology provides important enterprise-class management features enabling broad deployment of desktop virtualisation in the enterprise. These features include centralised management and a seamless user experience for applications running in virtual machines,” said Gavriella Schuster, senior director of the Windows product group at Microsoft.

Analysts view the pending acquisition as a move that will prove beneficial for customers. “This enables them to have a fully managed Virtual PC product, which to date wasn’t [managed] and thus was not fit for the enterprise,” said Natalie Lambert, senior analyst for desktop operations and architecture at Forrester Research.

Kidaro’s products are already built around Microsoft’s Virtual PC, and for this reason, it is easy for Microsoft to include it as part of its Desktop Optimisation Pack (MDOP), a suite of tools available to Software Assurance customers to help with deployment and management of both Windows and applications.

However, the ability to deploy managed virtual machines is something that rival VMware has offered for several years, notably in its VMware ACE suite.

“Acquisitions like this reinforce the message that VMware has been driving for many years: desktop virtualisation is a better way to manage and deploy desktop environments,” said Jerry Chen, VMware senior director for enterprise desktop.

VMware’s ACE enables companies to distribute virtual machines as secure sandboxes for workers using unmanaged machines, or for temporary workers. Policies attached to such machines control their behaviour, expiring them after a certain date, for example.

Kidaro’s technology has similar capabilities, but one of the chief reasons for Microsoft’s acquisition seems to be to aid firms migrating to Vista, which still has compatibility problems with older applications despite fixes in the recent SP1 update.

Schuster conceded that changes in Vista, such as its new security model, have had a compatibility impact. While Microsoft’s application compatibility toolkit can help mitigate some of these issues, some applications will simply never work on the new platform.

“A set of applications may not be compatible or not supported on Windows Vista by the vendor, and in this case customers look for new versions to be released, which may cause them to delay their Windows Vista migration,” she said.

With Kidaro, companies can continue to run such applications inside a virtual machine based on Windows XP while migrating to Windows Vista. Key to this scenario is that Kidaro can blend the applications seamlessly with those on the host platform, hiding that a virtual machine is operating at all, a capability Microsoft’s Virtual PC does not offer on its own.

“Windows XP applications will be seamlessly integrated into the Windows Vista desktop, including the start menu, and so the user does not need to understand the concept of virtualisation ­ they simply get on with their work as they did before,” explained Schuster.

Applications can eventually be migrated out of the virtual environment as Vista-compatible versions of them become available, she added.