Last year, Symantec Workspace Virtualization was included in a report from "Devil Mountain Software" hosted on the XPNet site.

The report was not flattering to our SEV application virtualization product. Based on the writing style and testing methodology we felt it was likely written by Randall C. Kennedy as a paid piece for VMware, although that information was NOT revealed in the report which was presented as an "independent" third-party opinion.

The report highlighted specific areas where ThinApp would indeed have performed better, but which we believed were misleading and largely irrelevant to a production community of users. For example, the testing left out a broad range of requirements for running application virtualization in an enterprise environment.

Well, today Network World posted an article reporting that it was indeed Kennedy working under an "alias" of "Craig Barth," the so-called CTO of Devil Mountain Software. Although Kennedy claims the information in his reports was unbiased and accurate, he was also slammed last week over the accuracy of a report he did on Windows 7 memory usage, which brought this whole issue to light.

In the article linked to below, he admits to writing the application virtualization performance paper for VMware/ThinApp, which XPnet still hosts on their site. Thus, we highly recommend anyone who has or is thinking of using this report as the basis for any decision to read the below articles carefully and seriously reconsider.

Network World: Windows metrics source lies about identity
http://ow.ly/19YBJ

ZDNet is also covering the story in this article:

ZDNet: Why we don't trust Devil Mountain Software (and neither should you)
http://ow.ly/19YD0