Year: 2008

Yesterday VMware announced a major change for its European business: Maurizio Carli was hired as General Manager of the EMEA region.
This implies the responsibility of the strategic planning, business operations and management of sales, channels, services and marketing.

Carli come from Google, where he was the Managing Director of the Enterprise division for EMEA.
Before that Carli was Senior Vice President and General Manager for EMEA at Business Object and even before he was Vice President of the EMEA Software Group at IBM.

We’ll see if the “Don’t be evil” philosophy that Carli adopted at Google will help VMware in improving the relationship with its European channel partners, which is not always idyllic, and stay ahead of the competition against Citrix and Microsoft.

Today Phoronix broke the news that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics.

The little company is behind the development of hugely popular Linux graphics technologies like:

• Mesa3D, the OpenGL component used by the X Window System
• Gallium3D, a software library for 3D graphics drivers
• TTM Manager, a video memory manager

So far VMware didn’t confirm the news or unveiled the amount of the acquisition, but the news is reported on the official website of the new subsidiary.

It seems pretty clear that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics to power its upcoming client hypervisor, a key part of its pervasive VDI strategy vCloud, where every centrally-managed virtual machine can be checked out and executed locally.

Read more

Surprisingly enough, Microsoft decided to test large scale deployments of its new hypervisor Hyper-V pushing hard its adoption among hosting service providers.

It was clear that the software giant would had a hard time entering the enterprise segment with Hyper-V where VMware has ruled for the last years, but most hosting shops have been fascinated by Virtuozzo so far and Microsoft was supposed to start a deep partnership with Parallels to win them.

Anyway Hyper-V was not developed from scratch for hosting providers, so it doesn’t come with a user interface that can be used by customers to buy and maintain their VPS.

DotNetPanel is filling this gap by announcing an Hyper-V module for its control panel, already popular for its support to Virtuozzo.

In July 2007, when VMware was preparing its IPO, one of the most impressive in the IT industry history, Intel invested $218.5 million in the virtualization vendor.

What happened after that between the two companies is a secret.
The VMware co-founder and former CEO, Diane Greene, may have tried to sell her creature to Intel just under the EMC nose, and eventually failed.
What is known is that Intel is now it’s getting rid of its VMW shares.

In November the chipmaker announced the intention to sell 3.75 million shares.
500,000 of them were sold the same month to Cisco.
Now another 967,398 share are sold for a value of over $23 million.

The startup MokaFive loses its CEO, Bill Demas, after just one year of work.

Demas took the position in July 2007, in concurrence with the second round of financing secured by the company.
Under his management MokaFive changed name (it was formerly known as moka5) and strategy, shifting its focus from the consumers to the enterprises.

Demas left in August to join Turn, an advertising company.
He has been replaced by a top figure in the IT industry: Dale Fuller.

Fuller served as interim CEO at McAfee for 1,5 years, as CEO at Borland, as Vice President of Macbook division at Apple.
Additionally Fuller is in the board of directors of AVG, one of the most popular anti-virus engine around, and covered the same role in Phoenix Technologies.

After all MokaFive doesn’t seem to have lost its consumer vendor identity, and the appointment of Dale Fuller seems to confirm this.

The startup Virtual Computer is completing the last steps to officially enter the market.

Last week its hybrid VDI solution, NxTop, moved to private beta, and now the company appoints its Vice President of Sales: Sandrijn Stead.

Prior to joining Virtual Computer Inc., Sandrijn served as executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Reflex Security Ltd (now Reflex Systems). As the first employee for Reflex Security in the EMEA region, Sandrijn built the global sales, technical and marketing teams and created a stable channel across the globe, including 300 VARs and 16 distributors.

Sun has just temporary shut down its cloud computing facility at Network.com.

The online platform was launched in March 2006 and offered the opportunity to buy certain amount of processing cycles at $1 / hour through simple PayPal account.
The user just had to upload its application and specify in how much time he wanted the execution of a certain workload.

This approach was not very flexible, requiring the customers to develop (or re-engineer) their applications for parallel computing on UltraSPARC processors.
Over time the company tried to mitigate this remarkable cost of entry by offering pre-installed applications, like 3D rendering programs.
Despite that, Network.com never became as popular as Amazon EC2, who offers empty Xen virtual machines where customers can install Linux and Windows guest OSes.

Read more

VMware continues to roll the Update 3 for its flagship product: VI 3.5.

At the beginning of October the patch was made available for vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) 2.5.
One month later the Update 3 hit ESX 3.5. And now it finally reaches the free version of ESX: ESXi 3.5

But unlikely the other products this fix doesn’t just fix the bugs and extends the hardware support.
The ESXi 3.5 Update 3 (build 123629) introduces a full set of APIs.

The VMware documentation doesn’t mention this aspect but Rich Brambley reported the major improvement: so far the only way to automate the management (for example through PowerShell) of this free hypervisor was to pass through vCenter and use the VI SDK.

Now vCenter can be skipped and ESXi directly managed in a programmatic way (or through free/low-cost vCenter alternatives that may bring in some sort of innovative features).

As consequence of this, the Update 3 brings in a read/write Remote Command Line Interface (RCLI), meaning that finally the customers will be able to change the hypervisor settings without using the vCenter Client.

Virtual Iron finally found a replacement for Mike Grandinetti, former Chief Marketing Officer, who left the company in May.

Susan Roberts replaces him as Senior Director of Marketing.
She comes from Dassault Systems where she was Director of Global Branding and Marketing Communications and Paxonix where she was Director of Marketing.

She holds a U. S. Patent (pending) for interactive consumer instruction and her work has been recognized by numerous regional and national award committees including the prestigious Clio Award for Best Interactive Television Service, as well as the Business Marketing Association Silver Award for achievements in database marketing and  the Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in Exporting.

Stephen Pollack, the founder and former CEO of PlateSpin (acquired by Novell in February) seems more busy now than when he was leading his own company.

Just two weeks ago Embotics, the Canadian startup focused on the VM lifecycle management area, announced the appointment of the successful entrepreneur as Advisor.
Now Enomaly, another Canadian company strongly refocusing on cloud computing, is doing the same.

Immediately after Pollack joined Embotics the company raised $4 million in a Series B funding.
We’ll wait to see what wonderful things will happen to Enomaly.