VMworld 2008 wrap-up – Part 3

In the previous parts of this wrap-up we summarized the brand new message that VMware delivered on stage (Part 1), trying to analyze its impact on the market, and the major technology trends emerging from the activity of its partners (Part 2).

In this last part we’ll take a look at how the competitors tried to position against VMware during its own event:

  • Citrix developed some impressive guerrilla marketing capabilities, anticipating for the second time the VMware moves right before their event.
    This time the company announced the availability of XenServer 5.0, which includes a number of features like the new high-availability module for Enterprise and Platinum editions developed by Marathon Technologies, the open storage APIs supporting DAS, NAS and SAN (both FC and iSCSI), the virtual machine tagging capability and more.
    XenServer 5 comes with a new Cloud edition (featuring a new consumption based pricing model) that it’s included in a new product bundle called Citrix Cloud Center, along with NetScaler, WANScaler and the upcoming Workflow Studio orchestration framework.
  • VMLogix continues to position itself as a VMware competitor in the virtual lab automation segment, announcing a new product that once again has the same name of the VMware’s one: StageManager.
    Of course the difference with VMware Stage Manager is that this solution will support Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors as soon as it will be out in December.
  • Trigence attempts a (weak) attack on the application virtualization front, announcing the availability of its Trigence AE 3.2 for Windows platform.
  • Kace, a system management company, has the same ambition and announces the acquisition of an application virtualization player: Computers In Motion.
  • Thinsy, the company that was brave enough to launch the nth commercial implementation of Xen in November 2007, still thinks it has a chance to gain some market share in the hardware virtualization segment and announces the second generation of its hypervisor.

This list may be incomplete but it’s evident that besides Citrix and Microsoft (that made its move the week before VMworld), there few companies that can afford the risk to go against VMware.
We’ll see if next year, when VMware vCenter will be everywhere, this list will become longer or not.