Microsoft recently published the white paper "Application Virtualization: The Next Frontier", detailing their Softricity acquisition product - discussing how Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization technology can help organizations curb IT costs, boost user productivity, improve service levels, and increase business agility.

"IT departments today are struggling to cut costs while increasing operational agility, delivering superior service, and maintaining high customer satisfaction. Application virtualization with Microsoft SoftGrid technologies can help with all of these goals. By converting applications into virtual services that are managed and hosted centrally but run on demand locally, application virtualization reduces the complexity and labor involved in deploying, updating, and managing applications. In addition, because the virtualized applications run in their own environment on client machines, they can significantly reduce application or operating system conflicts—and therefore reduce the need for regression testing or for server silos to host the various applications. With the resulted consolidations, hardware costs will be much lower than they are today and managing IT assets will be simpler, resulting in lower administrative costs. In short, by helping IT organizations decrease total cost of ownership (TCO), increase service levels, and more easily respond to changing requirements, application virtualization can serve as a strategic tool that delivers significant competitive advantage and that allows your organization to move further along the infrastructure optimization continuum."

Download this 19 page white paper, here.