VMware announced that TCHO, an emerging and innovative manufacturer of premium chocolate, has deployed VMware Fusion across the company’s Macintosh desktop systems to provide its staff with the flexibility to move seamlessly between native Macintosh applications and virtualized Windows-based applications.

TCHO’s mantra is “obsessively good dark chocolate.” It is a company where technology meets chocolate; where a Silicon Valley startup meets the San Francisco food culture. In keeping with that spirit, the company opted to standardize its desktops on the Mac OS for efficiency and manageability. The company, however, faced the dilemma that while the Mac is undeniably the most elegant platform, a number of essential business applications are not available for the Mac. Rather than spending heavily on Windows-based hardware and taking on the inefficiency of supporting multiple desktop environments, TCHO looked to VMware Fusion to turn Mac desktop systems into multi-OS computers for less than the cost of a new, additional batch of comparably powered, Windows-based desktops.

“One of our core operating heuristics is ‘be lean and mean,’” said Cash Shurley, IT director at TCHO. “We want to keep costs down and productivity up. VMware Fusion is a perfect fit for us. MacBooks and iMacs are consistent with our company culture. Our people prefer to use them and we prefer to support them. With VMware Fusion, our staff is able to use their preferred platform and still access Windows-based apps with just a few mouse clicks. It has worked beautifully. VMware Fusion is extremely reliable and delivers outstanding performance. It’s been a big win for our company.”

Employees access a number of business-critical applications via virtualized Windows desktops, including Zimbra Collaboration Suite, UPS WorldShip, QuickBooks POS, NetSuite and BlackBerry Desktop. TCHO also relies on VMware Fusion to access a number of technical applications that are used in the development and analysis of chocolate products.

“Virtualization is benefiting us on many levels,” said Shurley. “It cuts hardware expenditures dramatically. It reduces our power draw, which means lower utility costs. It makes our company much more scalable. We can provision a virtual machine almost instantly when a need arises. And we have a great disaster-recovery solution. If we experience a hardware glitch, we can simply use a VMware Snapshot to move the workload running in a virtual machine to another Mac. VMware Fusion just works.”