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:
Benefit to Software Developers
Reduce Development and Distribution Costs
Virtual appliances help lower the cost of developing and distributing enterprise software by abstracting applications and operating systems from underlying hardware, reducing the need for hardware testing as well as the number of platforms that developers must support.
Patching becomes easier because developers can ensure compatibility between application, OS and virtual machine components while distributing updates to customers as a single pre-configured package. In addition, virtual appliances help to reduce support costs because developers get more control over the OS and virtual hardware configuration, while at the same time reducing problems introduced by customer-installed device drivers or patches with unknown compatibility implications.
Accelerate Time to Market and Expanding Customer Reach
Virtual appliances are ideal for distributing enterprise software demos and evaluations because they are pre-packaged and ready to run virtualized hardware. By eliminating the time and complexity that customers face in evaluating software, developers can target new accounts, penetrate deeper into existing accounts, and expand reach to countries which otherwise may be beyond their scope. Virtual appliances can also help small-business markets in which customers have neither the time nor the budget to participate in traditional customer pilot programs.
Increase Security and Control
Virtual appliances allow vendors to maintain control over the integrity of their products with 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. These features make it easier to deliver appliances in a more secure and controlled manner.
