So far virtualization.info highlighted how the Cisco entrance in the server and virtualization markets is influencing the strategy of HP.
A couple of weeks ago we suggested that HP may want to acquire a series of companies (where 3Com is just the first one) to enrich its portfolio and be able to better compete, in the long run, against the VMware/Cisco/EMC merge-non-merge (the so called VCE coalition).
Specifically, if Cisco, leveraging its investment in VMware and its new partnership with EMC, starts to erode the HP market share, a possible scenario is that HP decides to offer its own virtualization layer, by acquiring an existing vendor.
On top of that, there’s the never abandoned feeling that VMware is morphing into an infrastructure management company, that one day may compete with HP (and CA, BMC and IBM) to rule the physical layer as much as the virtual one.
If HP considers this as a concrete scenario, it may want to act now to limit the VMware actions in the future.
A possibility is that HP comes out with its own hypervisor.
An article published on the corporate blog in February, unveils that the HP R&D department is actually working on this.
The research effort is primarily focused on developing a (Xen-based) hypervisor what works with the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology to offer secure desktop virtualization.
The project may never turn into a commercial platform, and its current purpose is far away from what is needed to compete against the VCE coalition.
Nonetheless the project shows that HP is active in this area.
Citrix is about to give away its XenServer product as open source. And the upcoming XenClient plaform may arrive as open source too.
How helpful this would be for HP to build their own virtualization stack?