rPath is the company that is pioneering the virtual appliance approach for application distribution and management. Virtual appliances are a key enabler of cloud computing. rPath was founded with a mission to simplify the delivery and consumption of software innovation. Vendors and customers alike spend far too much money managing the complex interactions between applications and the underlying infrastructure and operating systems that support them. We believe virtual appliances and cloud computing are the route to simplification. The datacenter becomes elastic when applications are released as coordinated sets of application images (also known as virtual machines or virtual appliances), each with Just Enough Operating System (JeOS) attached to provide the system services required by the application. These applications can expand or contract on-demand because there is no onerous configuration process to ready the general purpose OS for a specific application. Instead, the hypervisor accepts the image and applications are up and running in a matter of seconds. Even better, the process is totally repeatable to assure stability, security, and compliance as workloads scale, de-scale, and re-scale to meet the ever changing demand profiles of the application portfolio. Infrastructure can become a variable cost via this architecture when a cloud computing environment is also adopted. rBuilder and the rPath Lifecycle Management Platform automate the creation, configuration, management and maintenance of application images for virtualized and cloud computing environments. By producing application images that are optimized for any hypervisor, rPath frees the application from the underlying hardware, and enables a better model for development, deployment and support.