Following the similar trend of what is cloud computing and how will applications get there from my <a href="http://blogs.egroup.jasonmangone.com/?p=2515" target="_blank">previous post</a>, here is part 2 of the applications series.  Datacenters, private clouds, public clouds and personal computers are all designed for one thing.  Servicing users with applications.  During VMWare President and CEO, Paul Maritz's keynote address he made one excellent observation about applications today and where they are going to need to go in the future.  Applications today are relatively unmovable (or at least costly to move) and are targeted at a specific audience (devices) in the business environment.  However, the end user more frequently than ever is bringing a myriad of devices into the workplace along with the company issued devices (IPads, Macs, Droids, etc...) and wanting access to these business critical applications on these devices.  In order to do this developers and applications managers must shift their thinking and begin developing and adapting applications that are independent of the systems they run on.  Whether it be a web application, lob application, etc... (more on these in part 3... Virtual Appliances) these applications must be portable in and out of the cloud or between the devices (servers/hosts in this instance) that make up this cloud.  These applications must be manageable in a package/manage once, deploy everywhere, run anywhere type setup.  Most importantly the applications and IT must change from servicing devices to servicing the end user.

Servicing the end user and allowing them (and the market) to dictate what is the most efficient way (device) for them to interact with IT will be the true mountain to climb when moving to a true public cloud architecture.

This is where ThinApp 4.6 and project "Horizon" make great strides.<!--more--> ThinApp 4.6 comes with much more than just increased performance and Windows 7 compatibility.  Although, Windows 7 compatibility cannot be understated as a important feature release.  While I won't go into what is ThinApp, you can read that <a href="http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/" target="_blank">here</a>, I will discuss what is new and why it is important.  Two things stand out as major breakthroughs for ThinApp.
<ul>
	<li><strong>Services</strong>:  Although packing applications that installed services was possible in the prior version of ThinApp it was often not usable to the end user because all those dependant services would start (or wait to start) upon launch of the ThinApp every time.  Now, with version 4.6, the application packager has the option to install the dependant services on the end users machine and have them start with the machine like a native app would during the first run of the packaged application.  This results in application launch time reduction from 30 seconds to minutes down to a few seconds (depending on the app of course).</li>
	<li><strong>ThinDirect and IE6 harvesting</strong>:  ThinApp packagers now have an extra button that will automatically harvest IE6 from a Windows XP machine and package it in just a few steps.  This allows for legacy web applications that don't play nice with IE7 and IE8 to be able to be used within the virtual environment.  Now, managing multiple browsers and communicating what applications need to run in which can be tricky.  This is where ThinDirect comes to the rescue... the few easy steps above allows you to specify the URLs of the applications that need to run in IE6 during packaging and when a user navigates to this URL in their IE7/8 browser it will seamlessly launch and run that application in the IE6 packaged environment.  I saw this and completed this in a lab environment and it is slick to say the least.</li>
</ul>
Now that we are sold on ThinApp 4.6 and what it has to offer, it is time to get to the good stuff.  VMWare released details about a project codenamed "Horizon" that doesn't have an anticipated launch date yet but everyone I talked to is excited about it and cannot wait for it's release.  "Horizon" is a web based management portal and end user app store to store and deliver applications to end users in any environment (Thin Client, Fat Client, Remote).  It is a self service portal where administrators can limit access to certain applications based on user or group and select whether to force that application to the end user or not.  The end user can then log in to the app store and select which applications to run on their local machines.  This is true IT as a service, application consumers get what they need and only what they need.  The real breakthrough is that there is a RSS feed hookup that allows for 100's of free thinapped applications (IE6/7/8, Adobe Reader, Putty, any freely distributed app) to be immediately made available to the end users without packaging or maintaining updates on them.  This will allow administrators to limit the sources people get these applications (and the malware and viruses that come with them) without having a significant management and update process for 100's of applications themselves.  This is all done in a very simple, easy to use, web interface. 

Can't wait to get my hands on the first BETA of project "Horizon".  From what I have seen it will be a game changer for ThinApp and application delivery as a whole.

To wrap up and marry the meat of this post with the intro...  I believe a combination of ThinApp (application virtualization) that allows applications the same High Availability virtual servers get in the virtualized datacenter will provide the application mobility and alleviate the device dependency for end user applications such as Office, Adobe, Photoshop, etc... and will provide the platform that will allow these applications to be hosted anywhere and deployed everywhere.  Which is, cloud computing.

Stay tuned for Part 3 which is about enterprise applications, web applications, web services, etc...  Think ThinApp for the datacenter when you think of Virtual Appliances!