Microsoft to Buy Desktop Virtualization Company

Microsoft has bought Calista Technologies, which provides graphics technologies for next-generation desktop and presentation virtualization solutions, the company will announce at its Virtualization Deployment Summit in Bellevue, Wash., Jan.22.

Calista produces software that improves the end-user experience of three-dimensional and multimedia content for server-hosted virtualized desktops or applications delivered using Windows Terminal Services.

Microsoft has also extended its alliance with Citrix, which recently acquired XenSource, the open-source virtualization vendor.

The two companies will co-market a portfolio of new client computing offerings based on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Optimized Desktop solutions extended with Citrix’s XenDesktop and Presentation Server products and managed by System Center.

The combined offering is intended to give customers simple, flexible and low-cost client computing options, said Larry Orecklin, Microsoft’s general manager for server infrastructure.

The acquisition of Calista also fits into Microsoft’s strategy to provide a cohesive virtualization offering from the desktop to the data center, and to achieve that ubiquity as quickly as possible.

“Calista’s focus on network optimization is important to us, especially in the scenario where you are serving up client instances from a server over a network to an endpoint and where we need to be able to support a variety of different network connectivities,” Shanen Boettcher, Microsoft’s general manager for Windows product management, told eWEEK.

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