"Your phone is becoming a combination of your PC and wallet all rolled into one. This could become the most important device a consumer can own."
MVP would allow, for example, a user's work profile and personal profile to each have a virtual machine (VM) on a single phone, thus eliminating the need for separate phones for business and personal use. Additionally, upgrading to new phones would be as simple as moving the VM containing the persona from the old phone to the new one. That kind of complexity will require management products in much the same way that VM proliferation today pushes the need for similar management. But for the moment, VMware seems content to focus on the MVP hypervisor.
Right now, VMware only has a few competitors in the mobile hypervisor space, and Krishnamurti is correct when he says, "mobile virtualization is very much in its infancy."
Current competitors include VirtualLogix Inc. and Open Kernel Labs Inc., but that number is sure to swell. If the field is as potentially lucrative as VMware believes, expect serious contenders to start lining up -- similar to what's happened in data center and desktop-based virtualization. "[Mobile] processors are getting more and more powerful, phones are getting more and more memory. If there's value that virtualization is bringing to the table, people will start optimizing for it," Krishnamurti says.
Read the full interview by Keith Ward over at Virtualization Review magazine.
