VMware Studio has been around for some time.  In fact, version 1 was released on September 5, 2008.  However, there are still a lot of VMware users and software providers that are unfamiliar with this technology.  This solution allows developers to create VMware virtual appliances, and vApps (multiple virtual appliances combined as a unit) using this free authoring tool.  A cool feature of this utility, is the ability to convert existing Linux and Windows virtual machines in to the OVF format.  For more information on this tool, check out the website: http://www.vmware.com/products/studio/overview.html