In September 2008 a new US startup called BlueBear entered the virtualization space, previewing a promising management console, Kodiak, able to support VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.
Unfortunately, in more than two years, the company didn’t manage to deliver at least version 1.0 of Kodiak, and eventually went out of business.
Kodiak version 0.2 has been released as GPL open source and now it may be attractive for Red Hat (or Virtual Bridges), which is struggling to port the KVM management console developed by Qumranet (now called Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager or RHEV-M) to Linux.
The ones that are going to turn this into a fully functional product may win hundreds of customers, as Kodiak had over 10,000 beta participants over more than two years.
Anyway, in its current form, Kodiak is a risky bet.
To grant platform portability, BlueBear developed Kodiak as an Adobe Flex application. This may turn into a major downside as Apple continues to deny 3rd party application frameworks on its iPhones and iPads, and the two devices continue to gain popularity.
Corporations are increasing their conversion from BlackBerry to iPhones, and the adoption of iPad could be even bigger, to the point that IT administrators may start to look for native apps to remotely manage their infrastructure. In such not-too-distant future, Kodiak may be not the best choice.