IT departments today are struggling to cut costs while increasing operational agility, delivering superior service, and maintaining high customer satisfaction. Application virtualization with Microsoft SoftGrid technologies can help with all of these goals. By converting applications into virtual services that are managed and hosted centrally but run on demand locally, application virtualization reduces the complexity and IT labor involved in deploying, updating, and managing applications. In addition, because the virtualized applications run in their own environment on client machines, this can considerably reduce the application footprint on the operating system thus reducing application & operating system conflicts. The segregation and elimination of applications-OS conflicts can be instrumental not only for reducing IT operating expenditures but also for reducing the need for regression testing or for server silos. Last but not least, during OS migration, such as upgrades from Windows XP to Windows Vista platform, application compatibility issues that traditionally plagued OS migration can now be taken head-on. In short, by helping IT organizations decrease total cost of ownership (TCO), increase service levels, and more easily respond to changing requirements, application virtualization can serve as a strategic tool that delivers a significant competitive advantage and allows your organization to move further along the infrastructure optimization continuum.
For more information, please read the attached white paper
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608288.aspx