Year: 2009

While much is changing at VMware, something big is changing at Citrix as well: the company hired a new Chief Technology Officer for its application virtualization division.

Harry Labana, who was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs for the last nine years.

To announces his new position Labana published two posts (one and two) on the Citrix corporate blogs, sharing some interesting views on how the product line will evolve:

…There is some really cool stuff coming with power management, so watch this space, and some future ideas that I hope we gain traction on. There are some advanced management ideas that we are thinking about and upcoming features that will help simplify your lives. HDX/ICA will continue to get better and you will see some new capabilities in very near term releases of the protocol…

For the ones that are wondering: Simon Crosby is still at his position as the CTO of the Virtualization & Management division.

One of the main arguments of VMware to counter the recent strategy of Citrix to give away its virtualization technologies for free, is that XenServer is not mature enough compared to ESX, and that the product has not the features needed to satisfy the enterprise customers.

Today somebody with a certain relevance in the industry says that it’s not more the case: the Burton Group.

A few months ago the analysis firm announced a very interesting project to compare the virtualization offerings available on the market and see which ones met their criteria to be an enterprise-grade platform.
Richard Jones, Service Director of Data Center Strategies at Burton Group, presented this analysis at the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009 in May and turned some heads for sure.

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Citrix didn’t quite finish to give away its technology for free.
They started with XenServer in February, deciding to pack it with the multi-host management console (XenCenter), the virtual machines live migration (XenMotion), the dynamic resource management (Resource Pools) and a basic storage management capabilities.

To survive to this huge investment, which is on top of the $500 million paid in 2007 to acquire XenSource, the company changed the business model: profit would come from the support licenses and the sales of a premium management package called Citrix Essentials.

There’s a lot of skepticism about this new model, and while the SMB customers may greatly appreciate the move, many think that this is a nice way to slowly fade out Xen to finally adopt Microsoft Hyper-V and re-establish the well-known synergy already seen with Terminal Server and Metaframe/Presentation Server/XenApp.
But if Sun can use this model for its Solaris operating system, and plans to do the same with the XenServer competitor called xVM Server, then Citrix probably can do that as well.

Things get much more complex today, as Citrix releases a free version of Essential for Hyper-V.
The formal announcement will be given next week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC).

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Yesterday Citrix announced a new OEM agreement with Fujitsu Technology Solutions (formerly Fujitsu Siemens) about XenDesktop.

Starting next month, the Citrix connection broker will be part of the Virtual Workplace product, which basically is the end to end VDI architecture that Fujitsu offers to its customers by assembling together several 3rd party technologies, from the physical servers to the application virtualization platform.

The two companies also preannounced an upcoming OEM deal to ship XenServer with the FTS PRIMERGY racks and blade systems.

VKernel made a big progress in the last few months. It culminated with a Round B investment of $7 million, which is not exactly easy to get during a worldwide financial crisis.

Along with its product portfolio and its executive leadership, also its popularity is rapidly expanding.
In face the company reported yesterday a 260% growth in new customers acquisition in H1 2009 compared to the previous year.

As the virtual infrastructures grow in complexity the customers realize the need for a chargeback solution and the VKernel flagship product sales skyrocket.
It must be seen if this trend will continue as soon as their partner VMware will turn into a competitor by releasing its own chargeback product that was announced in January.

Propalms is a US company focused on the server based computing (SBC) market. Like many others in this space, it has the ambition to get a piece of the VDI pie as soon as it will become the new mainstream use of hardware virtualization.

The company joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program in April 2007.
In January 2008 it announced for the first time its intention to enter the VDI market in 2008.
It didn’t quite happen: after no less than 8 more months its flagship product, TSE 6.0, was able to act as a connection broker but only with VMware Server.
The company didn’t even bother to include the information in the press announcement.  

Now Propalms is back and announces again its entrance in the VDI market.
This time there will be a dedicated product called Propalms VDI, which is planned some time this year.
Hopefully this time will be for real.

The VMware executive replacement continues at fast pace since the replacement of Diane Greene with Paul Maritz as the company CEO.

A growing number of seasoned executives is joining the company from Microsoft, Borland, IBM and CA, and the replacement interests all departments, from the marketing to the public relations.

The last two new entries are taking their places in EMEA and in India.

The first one is Jean-Pierre Brulard, the new General Manager for the Southern Europe.
Brulard comes from SAP, where he has been the Senior Vice President of the Business Objects for EMEA for seven years.
Brulard joins another former Business Objects executive: Maurizio Carli, the new EMEA General Manager that was appointed in December 2008.
Carli and Brulard worked together at Business Objects from 2002 to 2007, when Carli was the Business Objects General Manager for EMEA.

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A couple of weeks ago, PRWeekus reported that VMware is changing its PR and communication structure.

First of all the company hired Aaron Feigin in May as the new Senior Director of Global Communications.
Feigin comes from Borland, where he has been Vice President of Corporate Communications for five years.
Feigin is not the first ex-Borland executive that joins VMware: in January the company hired Tod Nielsen, the former Borland CEO, as its new COO.

It seems that Feigin plans to make the VMware announcements less technical and more marketing oriented:

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Just two weeks ago MokaFive launched the second version of its enterprise solution, renamed Suite.

The company changed its strategy and executive team over the last three years and seems to lack a clear focus on how to deliver its vision.

Maybe the situation will improve in the coming future as they hired a new Vice President of Business Development: James Nicholas.

Nicholas comes from the venture capital world, where he was Director of Princeton Capital from 1996 to 2002 and Director of TriplePoint Capital from 2007 to February 2009.

In December 2008 a new startup called iCore Software entered the almost empty OS virtualization market, where Parallels is a leader (and potentially a monopolist if Oracle will kill the Solaris Containers technology as soon as it completes the acquisition of Sun).

At the moment iCore targets the consumer market but, as often happens in IT industry, as soon as the first investment will come in (and with it a bunch of seasoned board advisors), the strategy may change quickly.

At the moment their product, Virtual Accounts, is still in private beta and may appear hopeless in a highly competitive market where VMware (Workstation/Fusion), Parallels (Desktop) and Sun (VirtualBox), and soon VirtualPC embedded in Windows 7, are pretty mature and already address most of the customer needs. Anyway Cisco seems to have a different opinion.

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