Why Should You Build a Virtual Appliance?
Save time and money from both a technical perspective and a business perspective when you build a virtual appliance. You’ll lower development and distribution costs, accelerate time to market, expand customer reach, and provide an easy-to-use, more secure software delivery system – all while leveraging industry-leading virtualization platforms. Your customers and channel partners can easily deploy, evaluate, and purchase your solution when it is packaged as a virtual appliance.
See how virtual appliances benefit the following groups:
Benefits to Hardware Appliance Vendors
For hardware appliance vendors, virtual appliances offer a way to eliminate many hardware-related costs and complexities while gaining the ability to distribute their products through the Internet. Retaining control of OS and the virtual hardware configuration ensures the performance, security and stability of the solutions they offer.
Reduce Development and Distribution Costs
As with developers, appliance vendors can use virtual appliances to reduce the costs associated with hardware testing, patch updates, and technical support. In addition, virtual appliances also help to reduce or eliminate the burden of managing physical inventory and supporting hardware components, without sacrificing the ability to encapsulate the application OS and virtual machine together as an integrated, prefabricated product.
Accelerate Time to Market and Expanding Customer Reach
Virtualization and virtual machines have been a boon for sales teams who love the ability to deliver on-site demos of complex multi-tiered software using a single laptop or server. Virtual appliances make it even easier by packaging entire software stacks that sales professionals can carry around and share with colleagues and prospects in a secure and controlled manner. Virtual appliances also make it possible for appliance vendors to make their software available online for download, trial, and purchase; thereby helping them to increase awareness and reach out to customers that would not normally evaluate or purchase software appliances.
Increase Security and Control
Virtual appliances allow vendors to maintain control over the integrity of their products while giving customers the freedom and flexibility to use the hardware of their choice. Support for content verification and integrity checking based on industry-standard public key infrastructure, along with a built-in scheme for management of software licensing, all make it easier to deliver appliances in a more secure and controlled manner while relieving appliance vendors from the burden of securing hardware components that they don't often have physical access to.
