For the first time in its history VMware invested $20 million in a hosting provider: Terremark.
So far the vendor acquired several startups, most of them offering virtualization solutions that integrate with VMware Infrastructure. With a couple of exceptions VMware also acquire a software house, Sciant, and a consulting company, Foedus.
It’s very likely that VMware wants Terremark to become the cloud computing provider that unleashes vSphere 4.0 against Amazon and its EC2, which is based on Xen and may be sooner or later move to Citrix XenServer.
A first sign of it was visible during the VMworld Europe 2009 keynote in February, when Paul Maritz invited the Terremark EMEA CTO on stage to show their early implementation of the VMware vCloud initiative.
Terremark is a public company and the announcement made on May 26 gave its stock a small nice boost:
We’ll see if this move will trigger additional activities in the hosting space by other major virtualization providers. If Amazon doesn’t move to XenServer as many expect, then Citrix may want to follow VMware investing in Rackspace or Softlayer.