Kace claims to have elbowed its way to the forefront of application virtualization innovation with the latest version of its Virtual Kontainers technology, its way of handling the application lifecycle.

It’s only been in the application virtualization business a few months and the field is notorious for its high cost and complexity but Kace CTO Marty Kacin says that notion is a misconception – or at least it is with Kace’s stuff.

The company’s Virtual Kontainers 2.0 – not to be confused with Sun Containers – is supposed to give users an easier, faster and significantly less expensive way to create, deploy and manage virtual applications.

The latest widgetry includes a new signature update service that reportedly lets Kace respond quicker than other application virtualization products in supporting changes to Windows, middleware and new applications.

The company says it improves application compatibility. It supports updating, patching and modifying virtual applications.

And it can publish applications via a self-service user portal that reduces administrative overhead. Administrators can provide virtual applications via the web interface, saving time associated with ad-hoc deployments and keeping user desktops uncluttered with software they don’t need;

There’s command-line support too for administrators who prefer to script operations themselves, including creating a Kontainer package from the command line.

Kontainers is commonly used for Office, browsers, Adobe Reader and in-house custom software and competes against VMware’s ThinApp, Microsoft’s App V, Citrix’ XenApp and Altiris’ SVS.

Virtual Kontainers 2.0 will be available in mid-September at prices starting at $3,995 per 100 managed clients, same price as the existing 1.0 code. It’ll be offered as an optional module on Kace’s KBOX systems management appliance, the company’s traditional stock in trade. Under those circumstances the package will run $13,900.

The company claims 1,100 customers for its widgetry.