With a press release (http://blogs.vmware.com/view/2010/02/vmware-welcomes-rto-software.html) and Twitter post from CTO Stephen Herrod (twitter.com/herrod) VMware has announced the purchase of the assets and staff of RTO Software.
Today we are proud to announce that VMware has acquired the assets of Alpharetta, GA based RTO Software adding their technology and talented people to the VMware View team. For those of you not familiar with RTO software they are well known for their Virtual Profiles, PinPoint and Discover products which help IT organizations simplify desktop deployments while providing end-users with a rich, robust and flexible experience.
The core technology in play here is called Virtual Profiles and it is used for so called ‘persona’ management. Think Appsense and similar products.
More information about the technology and VMware’s plans for it in View can be found here: http://blogs.vmware.com/view-point/2010/02/vmware-to-acquire-rto-software.html
A snippet from that article:
We’ve been talking about provisioning users, not devices, and the importance of composition or layering in a desktop virtual machine – that a desktop VM is comprised of independent virtualized component parts that are dynamically brought together on demand into an encapsulated VM. One of those critical parts is the user persona, a user’s profile, data files and settings. Clean, efficient user persona virtualization is vital to our vision and that is precisely what RTO’s industry-leading Virtual Profiles will deliver for VMware. With persona management, end-user specific information such as user data files, settings and application access is separated from the desktop image and centrally stored, enabling increased flexible access, greater portability and seamless file management and backup.
Documenting a virtualization project 