Yesterday Citrix announced that more than 10% of Global Fortune 500 companies have downloaded and activated XenServer for production use in the last four months.
This seems to imply that these companies are actually using the Citrix hypervisor in production side-by-side with ESX, but the sentence may also mean that the product has been activated and there’s a plan to use it in production in future.
It doesn’t really matter: a 3rd party trusted entity has to confirm this market share increase before any conclusion can be drawn.
Anyway, if confirmed, it may be a bomb against the VMware fortress: it is a well-known fact that one of the biggest VI3.x selling points is its massive adoption in Fortune 100 (100%), Fortune 500 (98%) and Global Fortune 500 (95%) companies.
If more 10% of Global Fortune are really using the XenServer in production side-by-side with ESX then the landscape is changing more quickly than what most people believe.
More importantly, this may open the doors for a new wave of virtualization products that support multiple hypervisors as their first feature.
Of course the market already offers a number of them in different segments (capacity planning, P2V migration, VDI connection brokering, etc.) but the strategy for most vendors is to focus on ESX support and then carefully evaluate if Hyper-V or XenServer (rarely both together) are worth spending additional resources.
Not too surprisingly, this announcement comes just a few weeks after the Microsoft claim that Hyper-V conquered 24% of the market share.
It’s evident that the two are progressively increasing their pressure on VMware in this moment of transition.