Putting aside the much criticized emphasis about cloud computing, the biggest announcement of VMworld 2008 was that VMware is going to broaden its scope and product portfolio in 2009, invading pretty much every market segment and creating a lot of concerns for some of its partners.
VMware isn’t ready yet to show the new vCenter modules and stand-alone products mentioned on stage, but it’s teasing the customers with their names and core features:
- VMware Fault Tolerance
- VMware VMSafe
- VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch
- VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
- VMware vCenter Data Recovery
- VMware vCenter ConfigControl
- VMware vCenter Orchestrator
- VMware vCenter Chargeback
- VMware vCenter AppSpeed (formerly B-hive Conductor)
And this may be just a subset of the products that VMware is really preparing as the companies acquired in the last three years had much more intellectual property than the above.
It’s clear that VMware is showing its muscles, trying to clarify to the investors and customers that there will be no competition, no matter how hard Citrix, Microsoft and all the others will work to deliver innovation.
While this may be true (at least until Microsoft or Citrix decide to start a massive consolidation game in the virtualization market with several acquisitions in a row), the fact that VMware pre-alerts its customers about the upcoming products it’s like saying “hold your money until we arrive, don’t spend now on 3rd party offerings”.
The problem is that the 3rd parties are all VMware partners, which is making nervous several companies among the ones listed in our Virtualization Industry Radar.
Thanks to Vinternals for the news.