At the TechEd Technology Showcase booth tonight I was blown away by a very cool technology called SoftGrid. Microsoft acquired this recently.
SoftGrid is a virtualisation technology allows applications (as opposed to operating systems) to be delivered to the desktop (ie they are never installed on the desktop – rather it is almost like they are ‘streamed’ to the desktop). They are delivered by a SoftGrid server.
Why SoftGrid? Because it allows multiple versions of products to be run side by side – the demo showed Excel 97 and Excel 2003 running side by side on the same desktop, and then three different Java applications (each requiring a different Java runtime) running side-by-side. Amazing.
