Virtual Bridges

Virtual Bridges, Inc is a provider of desktop virtualization software. The company was founded in 2006 and is based in Austin, TX.
History
Virtual Bridges, Inc is the software company that acquired Win4Lin. Win4Lin was the company that acquired assets of Netraverse from ASSI, who were the principle investors in NeTraverse. Win4Lin, the product was a derivative of Merge in its NeTraverse incarnation, and was based on paravirtualization technologies pioneered at Locus Computing Corporation.
Win4Lin, the company, took a completely original approach to the product when it shifted from a Win9X based "guest" to a Windows 2000 and XP based guest. In 2005, the company also shifted focus from offering a standalone desktop virtualization solution to focusing on pioneering a VDI offering. The original full virtualization architecture adopted by Win4Lin, the company, was based on QEMU. With the emergence of Xen hypervisor technology and the introduction of virtualization capabilities in the hardware with VT, the company emphasized investment in the best-of-breed practices and functionality around the commodity hypervisor rather than focusing on the hypervisor itself.
Products
In 2008, the company integrated the successor to QEMU, KVM, into its flagship desktop virtualization product and re-branded it VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment). At the same time, the company entered a marketing agreement with IBM combining VERDE with the IBM Open Client Collaboration Suite (OCCS) to become the Open Virtual Client - now known as IBM Client for Smart Work (ICSW). As part of this agreement, Virtual Bridges added support in VERDE for not only Windows guests but also Linux guests.
In VERDE 2.0, released in May 2009, the company added support for an integrated client-side hypervisor becoming the first vendor in the industry to combine VDI with Client-side hypervisor. The Client-side hypervisor runs a replica of the centrally-managed Gold Master at the heart of VERDE's VDI model. This replica is automatically synchronized using the VERDE SMART (Self-Managing Auto-Replicating Technology) protocol.
In December of 2009 the company released VERDE 3.0 which added support for Windows 7 as well as the ability to access the VDI sessions from not only Windows, Linux and thin client access points, but also Macintosh access points (clients) as well. VERDE 3.0 also introduced a new capability called "Cloud Branch" which leverages the SMART protocol used for disconnected use to allow remote branch servers to be run centrally-managed Gold Master images on branch servers thereby eliminating WAN latency without requiring branch management of the servers and infrastructure.

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