One of the more intriguing ideas to bubble out of the virtualization ecosystem is VMCasting – the notion of distributing virtual machines via RSS feeds. Coined by Enomaly, an open source consulting firm best known for Xen management tool Enomalism and co-founder Reuven Cohen, its primary use today is as an Enomalism feature that allows large groups of virtual machines to be updated at one go.

I believe that VMCasting can also be leveraged as a friction-free delivery mechanism for business software vendors to push virtual appliances containing “ready-to-go” capsules of their solutions (fabricated using tools from vendors such as rPath or CohesiveFT) out to customers. This will eliminate the need for IT managers to pray that a new app will play nice with their existing stuff or sit around waiting for a hardware appliance to arrive in a FedEx crate.

Let’s say you’re an IT security manager. Won’t it be nice if you could subscribe to a feed of security appliances, and with just a few clicks test out those that look interesting? And if one really cuts the mustard, unlock access to its full functionality by making payment and signing a licensing agreement online?

Another potential use of VMCasting is for the deployment of apps to mobile phones. Veterans of the mobile apps space will likely have tussled with making their apps work across the amazing sub-varieties of mobile operating systems. And it can still be a dicey affair for end users to run rich apps through a mobile browser, especially in the absence of a fat wireless pipe.

From the perspective of an IT manager, the ability to easily & quickly push a standardized, pre-configured & encapsulated enterprise app out to all smart phones in their corporate network could prove rather appealing. And for end users, I certainly won’t mind being presented with a constant stream of cool apps matching my interests which I can install and run effortlessly with a single click.