| Mark Templeton Interview Reveals XenSource vs VMware Market Strategy |
| Thursday, 08 November 2007 by Michel Roth | |||
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Of course the bulk of the interview is about Citrix' acquisition of XenSource but Mark talks about why he thinks that Citrix' relationship to with Microsoft is so "fruitful". Mark expresses himself in a almost humble way which is not very typical for a billion dollar company CEO, which I personally think is a good thing: " Microsoft is a giant aircraft carrier. They move at very deliberate and predictable speed in enterprise computing. You know where they will be two or three years from now. So the onus is on you as a company to listen to those signals and steer with that, instead of getting in front of the aircraft carrier or getting swamped in the wake of it. Others just aren't paying attention. That's how we've done this. And we do all the things you need to get it done. And [Microsoft has] a long heritage with us. They were an investor in the second round (of startup funding), along with Intel. So our roots go way, way back." Mark also makes an interesting statement that illustrates a commercial strategy for Citrix' XenSource. This statement seems to contradict the buzz in the community that Citrix wants to take on VMware in this space: "We're not going to compete head-to-head. It's about a hypervisor being built by a community where everyone has self-interests in making it successful. [Citrix will be a] company that makes commercial products on top of [the hypervisor]—that leverage it up the stack as well as left and right [of the stack] with an ecosystem of partners and integrators." Read the entire interview here.
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