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Blog: VMware Hesitates at a Turning Point

Blog: VMware Hesitates at a Turning Point

Citrix is strong in desktop virtualization; Microsoft is stronger than you'd think in application virtualization, following its 2006 acquisition of Softricity, she says. VMware responded by buying ThinStall, which still trails Softricity in market share. "It's too early to call the network or storage segments, although VMware has to be considered very strong because it's owned by EMC," Didio says. "Overall the competition among the vendors is intense and cutthroat which bodes well for enterprises. It means that ALL of the vendors have to raise the level of their respective games and deliver great products the first time out, give their customers better deals (than they would have in the absence of the various rivalries) and of course, deliver great value-adds in the form of management, security and after market technical service and support."

That's a much more parlous situation than a vendor just waiting to see how successful a rival will be with one product. It's a demand for either a major change of course or impressive acceleration.

The key will be to give customers who will be using Hyper-V or XenServer or other competing products anyway to do it as easily as possible. To succeed, it must be clear that VMware products have been designed to manage all aspects of a virtual infrastructure, especially if parts of that infrastructure are short-bus versions of VMware's own products from other vendors.

VMware needs not only to support products from Microsoft, Novell, Citrix, Virtual Iron and others, but do it so overtly and so well that Microsoft customers feel the need to explain why they're using Microsoft management products (which Microsoft promises will support VMware) even for Hyper-V. If they have to explain why, no matter what the merits, they use the more-expensive VMware products when there are cheaper alternatives available, VMware loses ground.

I've heard all the arguments about why VMware's greater capabilities are, in fact, cheaper than having to kludge up a way to do similar things with feature-deprived products from other companies, by the way. There are still people, whether ill informed or not, who will put virtualization managers in a position to defend their own product decisions, largely based on price.

These people will often sit in the vicinity of the CFO's office, which makes them both hard to explain things to, and impossible to ignore.

Microsoft inevitably wins this argument unless the benefit of using VMware to manage other company's products is so clear and so easily cost justified that an IT manager can explain it to the CFO with one paragraph's worth of single-syllable words and absolutely no three-letter acronyms.

Managing multivendor virtual infrastructures would be a major benefit, but VMware could also take advantage of all the storage and consulting and integration expertise of parent-company EMC to build itself out as a full-service data-center supplier whose particular strengths are the efficient use and management of IT resources through server and storage virtualization and management.

That's a mouthful, but it's a strategy, not a product comparison and not a price comparison.

No matter how often it's said its expertise is in data-center technologies or how many of its products actually work effectively within a data center, Microsoft has never been able to build a lasting case for itself as a replacement for IBM or EDS or any other build-me-a-datacenter services company, and probably never will.

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