| Can VMware's Open Standards Moves Halt Microsoft? |
| Wednesday, 21 June 2006 by Michel Roth | |||
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At the launch of Virtual Infrastructure 3, the theme throughout was openness. That's the weapon the EMC subsidiary hopes will armour it against the threat that Microsoft poses. The openness ethic is about building an ecosystem of partners and developers, with the aim of putting VMware's market share and mindshare so far ahead that Redmond cannot catch up. To buttress its position, to expand its range of partners and increase the use of virtualisation generally, VMware has made three crucial industry-related moves. Last August it launched an initiative, which included partnerships initially with Dell, Emulex, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, QLogic and Red Hat, to advance open virtualisation standards. VMware made its second move last December when it announced it would be giving away Player, aimed at developers, and then, later, what used to be called GSX Server but is now just called VMware Server. The latter is aimed at smaller enterprises and gives them a foothold on the virtualisation ladder. And finally, it also launched the Virtual Appliance Challenge, which encouraged its commercial partners and community developers alike to come up with neat idea for virtual machines. Additionally, VMware has just launched Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3), which offers the ability to run an entire data centre stuffed with VMs from a single console. It should, says VMware, boost productivity, and extract maximum use from both processor cycles and virtualisation generally. What you can expect though is that Microsoft won't take this kind of attack lying down. It never has in the past, taking one or more of a number of routes, including: buying the competition; delivering its own, me-too products just about good enough to capture the mainstream market; or turning the company around to embrace the strategy that worked for its opponents... Read the entire article here.
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