VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.

For mobile phone users, the benefits of mobile phone virtualization mean they can run multiple profiles on one device. It also means that an entire mobile phone's persona - including applications, photos, videos, music, email, etc. - can be easily ported from one device to the next.

For manufacturers, virtualization means they can deploy their software to a wide variety of phones without having to worry about the underlying hardware. It would also allow handset vendors to run their "trusted services" like DRM, authentication, and billing in tamper-proof virtualized environments.

According to Monica Basso, research vice president, at Gartner, virtualization for mobile devices is the next big thing. "We predict that by 2012, more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized," she says.

Of course the unanswered question here is the one everyone wants to know: will VMware's MVP run as an iPhone app?