Year: 2010

Over the last 12 months the security firm Tripwire took a series of steps to focus more on virtualization.
It first released a couple of free tool (ConfigCheck and OpsCheck) in collaboration with VMware to simplify the ESX hosts configuration management. Then it hired the well-known expert Stephen Beaver as its new Virtualization Evangelist. And finally the company released vWire, a configuration compliance tool that was very promising.

After just 6 months after the first release (vWire 1.0 was out in June 2009) the company announced that it has decided to permanently discontinue it and return to its core business.

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At the beginning of December 2009, Parallels lost one of its highest executives: Kurt Daniel, who was the Senior Vice President of the Online Business department and in charge for worldwide marketing, business development and corporate development.

Daniel spent five years at Parallels. He is now the COO of a Web 2.0 startup called WorkLight.

The press announcement released by his new employer and his LinkedIn profile, reveal some interesting information about the Parallels financial status: over $100M profitable annual revenue and over 1.5M customers worldwide.

Update: Parallels contacted virtualization.info and clarified that Daniel actually left the company in January 2009. His position wasn’t replaced but the company built a new marketing team over the year and hired Kerry McGowne as their new Vice President of Corporate Marketing.

McGowne was the VP of Corporate Marketing at ServiceSource before joining Parallels in September 2009, and before that he was the Director of Executive Communications and Director of Platform Strategy and Marketing at Microsoft.

As many virtualization.info already know (at least if you follow us on Twitter), the virtualization guru Scott Lowe has been just hired by EMC.

Lowe has been the National Technology Lead for Virtualization at ePlus Technology for almost four years.
But he also is one of the most popular virtualization expert in the industry thanks to his high quality blog (which virtualization.info named a top blog of 2008).

Lowe is also the author of the recently published book Mastering VMware vSphere 4, reviewed here.
Last but not least he has been a top speaker during the inaugural edition of the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress in Las Vegas last year.

Lowe will join EMC starting next week as Cisco-VMware Solutions Principal (which means he will focus on the VCE vBlock technology). He will work with Chad Sakac, the extremely popular Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC.

InstallFree, the Israeli startup that entered the application virtualization market in April 2008 with a promising product, just lost its Vice President of Field Marketing David Karofsky.

Karofsky moved to its family business as President.

The InstallFree marketing department continues to be led by Jeanne Morain, the former VP of Marketing and Strategic Alliances at Thinstall.
Morain joined InstallFree in January 2009, after Thinstall was acquired by VMware.

For the ones that don’t know it, Zimbra is an online/offline collaboration suite which Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350M in cash and that competes with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) PIMs offered by Google or Zoho for example.
Zimbra also offers an open source mail client that competes with products such as Microsoft Office and Mozilla Thunderbird.

The platform didn’t get much traction compared to the competitors above and Yahoo is rumored to be trying to sell it since September 2008.

Now All Things Digital, the tech division of the The Wall Street Journal, is reporting that VMware is acquiring Zimbra.

While this is seems extremely unlikely, WSJ is very reliable news source and Kara Swisher reports confirmations from multiple sources.
So, assuming this rumor will be confirmed as true, the question is: why a virtualization vendor like VMware would want a SaaS collaboration suite like Zimbra?

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Many have said that 2010 will be the year of cloud computing. What this really means is unclear, just like the definition cloud computing.

Problem is that cloud computing means too many things already and the market doesn’t even exist.
The industry somewhat agreed to recognize as cloud computing just three major architectures (with examples):

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
  SalesForce CRM
  Google Apps
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
  Google App Engine
  Microsoft Azure
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
  Amazon EC2
  The Rackspace Cloud

But the reality is that the expression “as a service” can be applied to much more than that, and the vendors’ marketing departments learned this game too well during the advent of virtualization.
So, for instance, we can find things like Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) or Computer-as-a-Service (CaaS), which simply are IaaS architectures which only serve virtual desktops instead of generic virtual machines. It’s like saying Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) on demand.

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Vendors’ marketing departments spend a lot of time promoting performance analysis when a new virtualization platform or a new server hardware hits the market, but are the customers interested?

Right now we have only two benchmarks methodologies to measure virtual infrastructures: the VMware VMmark (launched in July 2007) and the Intel vConsolidate (launched in December 2006).

There’s also an ongoing activity at the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) to define a standard practice but the development is so slow that nobody really knows if hardware virtualization will still be around for its release.
Additionally, virtualization.info got a tip that Intel discontinued vConsolidate during the second half of 2009 (we are still waiting for an official answer on this).

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