Yankee Group today announced that virtual appliances will enable the delivery of better-quality software and an improved user experience. The virtual appliance is an emerging new development for the software industry.

According to the recently published Yankee Group Report, Virtually Possible: Virtual Appliances Ready to Shake Up Application Delivery, IT infrastructure and its relationship with applications has dramatically changed with the rise of Anywhere computing enabled by server virtualization.

ISVs now have a new way of delivering their software through virtual appliances?a virtual machine that consists of an application and an integrated OS. A customer-created virtual machine would normally consist of an OS such as Windows or Linux on top of an installed application. But virtual appliances also escalate the war between Windows and Linux. Open source (primarily Linux) beats proprietary (Windows) in a virtual environment.

?Virtual appliances bring dramatic changes to an entrenched ecosystem of OS vendors, ISVs and IT departments, but changing the culture and businesses of these parties will not be easy,? said Gary Chen, Yankee Group Enterprise Research senior analyst. ?From an ISV and customer perspective, it?s hard to argue with the benefits that virtual appliances bring. However, this major shift in the software stack will mean that operating systems will have to totally transform themselves to be relevant in this new Anywhere computing environment.?

As virtualization progresses and the concept gains acceptance, virtual appliances may become the predominant and only platform for ISVs. Some of the benefits of virtual appliances for ISVs and customers are:

• Lower support costs: Supporting a myriad of customer OSs, all with different versions, patch levels, and configurations is becoming a support nightmare.
• Better quality software: By removing the variables of customer-installed and -configured operating systems, ISVs can have complete control of their software operating environment.
• Easy scalability: Virtual appliances can easily be moved to a faster machine.
• Quick deployment: Virtual appliances plug into existing virtual infrastructure and come pre-installed, pre-configured and ready to start.