Kace claims it has torn down the barriers to application virtualization. Aside from price that largely means complexity, which in turn means it’s largely a boon to administrators.

The systems management appliance house has run up this widgetry called Virtual Kontainers, not to be confused with Sun Containers, that it says “dramatically” simplifies application distribution and management. It derives from Kace’s acquisition of Computers in Motion and marks its entry into the application virtualization market.

The five-year-old company claims Kontainers is easier, faster and cheaper than other application virtualization solutions. (It’s mainly thinking VMware’s ThinApp.) And all functionality is handled via an integrated web console.

Meanwhile, Forrester is claiming that 74% of SMEs are looking to desktop and application virtualization to solve their PC management issues.

Delighted with the findings, Kace suggests the lousy economy may have something to do with it. Kace generally services the mid-market, which it defines as companies with 100-10,000 machines.

Virtual Kontainers is supposed to push the traditional application virtualization technologies to a new level by extending their features to include application isolation, automated creation, centralized management and active metering.

Kace says its technology overcomes the complexity of application deployment such as the need to research methods of automated installation; ensuring that the installation succeeds on all target systems; ensuring that new app dependencies don’t break the ones already installed; tracking licenses and usage limits; and testing to ensure trouble-free removal.

The widgetry will be available the end of April as an optional module in the company’s KBOX Systems Management Appliance and will start at $3,995 for 100 managed clients with discounted price tiering after the first hundred nodes.

The Mountain View, California firm is planning on introducing other Kontainer technologies according to product management VP Lubos Parobek.

Kace, which claims VDI is too heavyweight and impractical – you have to virtualize the entire machine and stream over the network – claims 900 customers for its existing line, heavily education and state and local government accounts.

It will now be competing against Citrix’ XenApp, Microsoft’s App-V as well as VMware’s Thin App.