Inside the Briefcase
VirtualBridges Staking Ground in Growing Market for Desktop Virtualization
January 31, 2011 No CommentsSOURCE: Statesman.com
Jim Curtin has an informal description for the kind of software his company develops.”It’s plumbing,” he says with a smile.
By that Curtin means that Virtual Bridges Inc. creates the kind of essential software plumbing, sometimes called “middleware,” that could change business computing dramatically within several years.
His 6-year-old company plays in a market called desktop virtualization, where the goal is give businesses an automated way to handle the unending job of keeping business computers — and the data they contain — fixed, updated and secure.
That amounts to a huge problem. Businesses spend vast amounts — by some estimates more than $150 billion a year worldwide — and hire small armies of computer technicians to keep their computers running and their data safe. That’s a big problem for businesses, but it also affects other customers who own lots of computers, including school districts and government agencies.
The challenge is to provide more centralized control and protection of computers while enabling growing legions of mobile workers to wander the world with their portable computers that are untethered from the company network.
