As the virtualization technology sector continues to evolve hardware virtualization and application virtualization techniques and innovations, it's interesting to watch the patent play that is happening around us. One of the first players to jump into the patent infringement game was Stream Theory, defending its patent claims over streaming applications by filing lawsuits against Softricity, AppStream and Exent. This explosion happened shortly after Microsoft dropped a bomb of its own, announcing its acquisition plans of Softricity.

Now, Mobile Agent Technologies is blasting a PR announcement of its own stating that it too has been granted a patent for application virtualization techniques.

As someone extremely interested in this somewhat infant market, I can only hope that innovation in this promising area continues to thrive and that it doesn't get stifled by courtroom drama.

Quoting from the official press release:

Mobile Agent Technologies announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has given final approval to their industry changing invention for relocating a running software process from one machine to another, completely intact, without any disruption in execution. The technology, called Automatic Thread Migration (ATM), provides for a system in which environmental monitoring facilities sense a lack of available computing resources, such as memory, network bandwidth, or CPU cycles, and then autonomously trigger the migration of the software process to a secondary host. At the same time components located on a tertiary machine, either in the same data center, or across the globe, maintain the execution stack trace and state of the program, and facilitate restarting the process exactly at the point at which it left off, prior to it's relocation to the secondary host. The migration is seamless and transparent to the application. This fault tolerant technology when fully implemented will eliminate an organization's need for backup data centers.

Mobile Agent Technologies has also announced the availability of an early access version of AgentOS, an agent based operating system. AgentOS represents the convergence of three current trends in the computing industry. The first being application virtualization, the second grid computing, and the last, service oriented architecture (SOA). Significantly improving upon the technical design of first generation corporate computing grids, AgentOS is based upon a zero middleware architecture. This eliminates the intermediary tier most commonly found in today's enterprise application infrastructures. Unlike existing application virtualization technologies whose approach to process migration is operating system dependent, AgentOS is agnostic in this respect, and can work in mixed heterogeneous environments consisting of both Windows, Unix and Linux machines. In regards to SOA, AgentOS supports the creation of reusable software building blocks which can be dynamically assembled, and then reassembled, into robust enterprise applications. An object oriented, agent based component model, allows business logic to be more easily adapted and reused, as compared to alternative development tools such as web services.

Mobile Agent Technologies has instituted an early access program for companies who would immediately like to take advantage of the significant cost savings provided by AgentOS. In addition, Mobile Agent Technologies is actively seeking business partners, including professional service firms, computer hardware manufacturers, systems integrators, and enterprise software companies. Recommended uses for AgentOS include supply chain management, logistics, compute intensive banking, brokerage, and human resource applications, risk management, insurance underwriting, computer gaming, business intelligence, and simulations.

Posted by David Marshall on June 19, 2006 07:02 PM