It’s a real pain for software makers to make their code work on the wide variety of mobile devices on the market. They have to adapt applications for different processors, phone innards and a variety of basic frameworks like Java and Adobe’s AIR.

Sensing a marketing and business opportunity, the virtualization software maker, VMware, has stepped up to help out the mobile set. On Monday, it announced the Mobile Virtualization Platform, or MVP, a virtual software layer aimed at mobile devices.

VMware inherited the MVP software when it bought Trango Virtual Processors in October. The technology serves much the same function as VMware’s flagship server product, adding a flexible software layer onto hardware and making it easier to move applications from device to device.

The basic pitch is that software makers can wrap their code in VMware’s technology and transfer their applications to a wide variety of devices without needing to tweak it for the peculiarities of each device. Ideally, this saves software makers time, money and general angst.

VMware claims that phone users could benefit as well by creating different software profiles on their devices. You could have a work profile with certain contacts and applications and then one for friends. The point of these options is not completely clear.

While VMware is as excited as can be about the technology, it’s not actually providing a release date for the new MVP software.

The research firm Gartner seems excited as well, concocting a forecast for how this type of technology will play out, even though it’s not even on the market yet in any meaningful form.

“Gartner sees virtualization in the mobile space as a very promising and potentially a fast-emerging market,” said Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. “We predict that by 2012, more than 50 percent of new smartphones shipped will be virtualized.”

In the server and desktop world, virtualization software tends to eat up a lot of computer memory and slow down the performance of applications. Any such performance hit would be magnified on a mobile device, which usually needs all the horsepower it can get to run more sophisticated software.

The performance issue is one of the reasons that software makers work hard to customize their applications for specific devices. So it will be interesting to see how the sort of general-purpose idea being promoted by VMware plays out.

You can bet that Intel, an investor in VMware, will back the technology. The chip maker has a new line of mobile device processors sold under the Atom brand. Intel’s chief executive, Paul Otellini, has argued that device makers should standardize on the Atom chip and Intel’s familiar architecture rather than dealing with various flavors of other mobile chips, which often use the ARM architecture.

Earlier this year, the virtualization start-up MokaFive released a package for virtualizing iPhones.

Reference URL:http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/vmware-lends-virtual-hand-to-mobile-phone-crowd/