vmware

EMC's Gelsinger plans to deliver application fluidity

Pat Gelsinger, EMC's COO for Information Infrastructure Products, recently imparted a new vision for the future of IT to a group of analysts gathered in Hopkinton, Mass.

Gelsinger, who now manages some of the company's crown jewels like the storage products division and is EMC's executive sponsor for VMware, said EMC is out to change the structure, technology, and possibly the behavior of the IT community.

That's a tall order to fill even for someone as obviously energetic and experienced as Gelsinger, and so if you react to that statement with a measure of skepticism, you'… Read more

Hypervisors are not commodities

One of the dynamics of the server virtualization marketplace that doesn't get the attention it probably should is the question of where the hypervisor "lives" and gets delivered to buyers. Services, such as load balancing and replication, that leverage a virtualized foundation to construct what goes by names like Dynamic IT may be ultimately more important than the foundation's components. However, the choice of hypervisor matters today if only because it serves as a sort of control point for the profitable components above.

Hypervisors get delivered in three different ways.

The first is in the form … Read more

VMWare vs. Parallels: We have a winner (for now)

There are several common implementations of virtualization available for OS X, which allow for you to run Windows and other operating systems on your Mac. These have been convenient, and though they offer "up to" native speeds, there are many times when more-advanced features in modern operating system will cause major performance issues, so how do these programs actually compare?… Read more

Which open-source vendors can afford the cloud?

Cost and quality are two driving factors for open source's role as the bedrock for public cloud computing. Google, Amazon, and other public cloud providers simply can't compete with expensive, proprietary license-burdened infrastructure. They need open source.

As cloud computing matures and moves from public to private clouds, however, we may see enterprises flock to free (as in cost) and open (as in freedom) infrastructure, too.

What would this mean for subscription-based open-source vendors?

It might not be pretty. Tim O'Reilly pointed out nearly two years ago that

almost all of the software stacks running on cloud … Read more

Reports: Tech recovery driven by developing nations, cloud

Analysts may differ on the strength of the technology spending recovery, but they're increasingly in sync on believing that 2010 will see a healthy rise.

Both Forrester Research and Goldman Sachs recently updated their projections on technology spending in 2010, and both see global spending on the upswing: Forrester projects 8.1 percent growth while Goldman Sachs's new "Mapping 2010: Key Tech Trends to Watch" report forecasts a more conservative 5 percent growth.

It's fair to say, however, that technology vendors will be happy with either outcome, especially as the U.S. continues to shed jobs.… Read more

Yahoo sells Zimbra to VMware

Yahoo has finally offloaded its open-source enterprise e-mail division, Zimbra, to VMware.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the sales price is believed to be far less than the $350 million Yahoo paid for the company in September 2007. Kara Swisher at Boomtown reported that the sales price was "well below" the acquisition price, but didn't specify an amount.

Zimbra makes e-mail and office collaboration software, and some parts of its technology will continue to stay within Yahoo as part of Yahoo Mail and Calendar, Zimbra's Jim Morrisroe, vice president of sales, said in a blog post … Read more

Open-source acquisitions: What's the holdup?

Trying to figure out a company's acquisition strategy is often complex. Some companies have very purposeful approaches to scoping out companies, products, and market segments, while others' approaches are much more scattershot.

Acquisitions of open-source companies have been a big topic of conversation ever since Red Hat acquired JBoss in April 2006. Many of us in the software industry thought that one or two large companies would snap up and consolidate several open-source companies in attempt to offer a complete open-source stack. But an open-source consolidator has yet to materialize.

In recent conversations with a number of open-source executives, it's come to light that many potential acquirers are less attracted to open-source companies that require more investment before generating revenue.

Considering that there are few private open-source companies generating beyond $15 million in annual revenue, an acquisition of an open-source company could certainly be tough for a public company to explain to Wall Street.

While a focus on the bottom line makes sense, product investment comes from many angles, not the least of which are users and developers, key drivers in VMware's acquisition of SpringSource.

If you follow the way Oracle and IBM acquire others, you see them expand portfolios--sometimes to the point where they own several similar product offerings. But from a competitive perspective, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

IBM already offered BPM, or business process management, products but acquired Lombardi to gather the revenue streams under their umbrella. Oracle, on the other hand, offered a whole suite of middleware before it acquired BEA Software but did so to achieve the economy of scale and single-source purchasing power that buyers seem to want. Oracle also acquired and immediately shut down Virtual Iron to get the product out of the market.

They may not be pretty, but these are smart tactics. … Read more

Zimbra buy to raise VMware's cloud ante

Most entrepreneurs are lucky to sell one start-up. A chosen few manage to repeat the feat, building and selling two or more businesses. The folks at Zimbra have outdone them all, selling the same company...twice.

As Kara Swisher of All Things Digital reports, VMware is expected to soon announce the acquisition of open-source messaging company Zimbra from Yahoo. My own sources at VMware confirm the deal.

While Swisher's report gets the Zimbra ownership change correct, its indication of a distressed asset sale misses the mark.

It's true that Yahoo has never known what to do with Zimbra, … Read more

Five big business techs of the decade

I've been an IT industry analyst for almost 10 years. I've seen many technologies come, go, or fail to even arrive in the first place. However, during that time, a few techs have emerged that play a big part in fundamentally defining how businesses do computing. Most first emerged prior to 2000, but it has been during the past decade that they've truly changed things.

1. x86 processors were already well entrenched in corporate computing by the end of the 1990s, especially in their role as the "(In)tel" part of "Wintel" servers … Read more