VMware bought a company (Thinstall) who offered an application virtualization product. VMware renamed that product ThinApp. Similar in concept to Microsoft’s SoftGrid (now Microsoft Application Virtualization), ThinApp allows you to virtualize your applications and deliver them from servers in the data center. This prevents application conflicts, allows for easy end user device replacements, allows for easy software deployment and, overall, saves time and money. 
Figure 1: Image Source: VMware.com