Every organization, no matter what the business involved, to achieve efficiency needs efficient people working for them. For a long time now, operating systems and applications have represented important tools in the work of these people and organizations. And if we are not capable of providing users with the proper tools, gaining an agile, dynamic, and scalable platform to provision these technologies, then we will probably affect the organization's productivity. We will also generate for ourselves, as IT workers, a lot of effort supporting end users and troubleshooting operating systems and applications installations or configurations over and over again.

Virtualization technologies appeared in order to assist us in these matters and to make a direct impact on the organization's costs for hardware, energy consumption, and maintenance of IT platform. Application virtualization helps us achieve the agility and scalability we are seeking in several ways—centralized management of applications, removing repeated installations, isolating environments to avoid instabilities in operating systems, consistent and easy-to-manage deployments, and so on.

Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) 4.6 represents in my opinion the most complete solution for virtualizing applications, and has some interesting benefits compared to other similar technologies available in the market. For example, supporting both 64-bit clients and applications, having the possibility of delivering (streaming) applications via HTTP/S protocols, generating MSI files as an alternative for offline users, high level of integration with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), and so on.

As with any technology and implementation, we must first understand the components involved (including the applications to virtualize), understand the requirements and possibilities of our organization in order to realize the proper design, planning, and implementation.