The first big vendor to introduce an application virtualization product was VMWare, the name of its product was VMWare ThinApp. ThinApp was actually an earlier technology bought from another vendor called Thinstall. VMWare ThinApp will let you virtualize a complete application down to a singe executable.  It’s advantage lies in the fact that you do not need to install any software (remote agent) on the target machine for updating or installing the virtualized application. If you want to know more about VMWare ThinApp, here is a step by step article on What is VMWare ThinApp

Microsoft’s Application Virtualization technology is called App-V , named in tandem with its main Virtualization offering Hyper-V. App-V in recent times has been gaining a bigger market share in application virtualization because with the right deployment and combination of software install techniques using Active Directory, software (application) updates can be a breeze and with Codoid.com they can be tested easily.  In Microsoft based environments, it takes the edge although it does involve installing a remote agent on the target machines.

Citrix, also offers Application Virtualization via its product called Citrix XenApp, named in tandem with its Virtualization Suite called XenDesktop. XenApp was formerly developed as an application hosting solution. One of the advantages of Citrix Xenapp is that it offers a web based interface for connecting to the particular application, which a user with right privileges can connect from anywhere. The drawback again is that you need to install the Citrix ICA client for connecting via the web interface.

There are other Application Virtualization Suites available from other vendors, such as Symantec Software Virtualization Solution from Symantec etc, but the above mentioned three vendors, VMWare, Microsoft and Citrix have the majority of a market share in Application Virtualization. If you use another product or have some feedback, please do share with us.