BMW uses about 1000 business applications throughout its 250 sites around the world, and installing and managing them manually is a time-intensive, cost-intensive task. A couple years ago, the auto manufacturer started looking for ways to package more applications together for central management and to decrease the amount of compatibility testing that had to be done, reports Shane O'Neill at CIO.

At the end of 2008, BMW decided that it would use application virtualization to address the problems of group packaging and application compatibility, O'Neill writes in a very detailed look at the company's virtualization initiative. BMW was using an IT management product from Microsoft that includes a virtualization tool called App-V. App-V transforms physical applications into virtual services, which are not installed but can be managed by the IT department, O'Neill reports.

By the end of this year, BMW will have virtualized more than 400 applications. With App-V, the company cut in half the amount of time it takes to deploy applications. What's more, it takes less than a day for compatibility testing, compared to six days before. Going forward, when employees request applications, the primary packaging and delivery option will be virtualization. 

For more:
- see Shane O'Neill's article at CIO

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