The Hindu Business Line : Microsoft unveils Virtual PC 2007

(From left) Mr Srini Koppulu , Vice-President and Managing Director, Microsoft India Development Centre, with the software engineers at the centre on Thursday. - P.V. Sivakumar

Hyderabad March 15 Microsoft Corporation today unveiled their Virtual PC 2007 here today that allows multiple operating systems to run at the same time on one personal computer.

With Virtual PC one can create several machines in a personal computer as if there were multiple sets of hardware in the computer and thereby help access information residing in a particular operating system without difficulty.

This was fully developed by researchers at the Microsoft India Development Centre (MSIDC) and has had about 4,50,000 downloads in less than a week since its availability. It has become one of the most popular downloads.

The Managing Director of MSIDC, Mr Srini Koppolu, said that Virtual PC provides a time saving and cost saving solution anywhere users must run multiple operating systems. This helps in streamlining and accelerating deployment.

The General manager of Windows Group at MSIDC, Mr Amit Chatterjee, said that the last count indicated that it has been useful for over 1,500 different operating systems even though the product support covers some seven operating systems including Windows Vista and Windows NT.

Virtualisation allows business customers to migrate to Windows Vista for a more secure and manageable experience while keeping a previous Windows environment to run its already existing application.

Significantly, enterprises that have information residing in different operating systems would also gain through virtualisation, Mr Chatterjee explained.

The customer spend on virtualisation is poised for significant growth from $1.5 billion to $5.3 billion by 2009 and trends point towards enhanced investment from enterprise customers. The virtualisation drive is happening at both the software level but is also being driven by some hardware vendors and chip-makers such as Intel and AMD, Mr Chatterjee said.

TO EXPAND

Given this backdrop, MSIDC plans to invest in expanding their virtualisation team in India that would include Windows Server Virtualisation move through Hypervisor and also to help better manage data centres.

Citing a practical case, Mr Chatterjee said that if you try and run a particular game that supports only a specific operating system, and you have a Windows Vista OS. Then through Virtual PC 2007, it would be able to access this game.

From enterprise perspective, where information resides in different operating systems, the legacy data can also be retrieved thereby helping in easier migration that helps in streamlined and accelerated development process, they explained.

MSIDC, Mr Koppolu said, was passing through an exciting phase and that they were working on over 15 product streams that includes incubating some innovative areas in RFID (radio frequency identification), a centre of excellence for mobility that seeks to integrate more applications for mobile devices and data protection for businesses among other areas.

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