VMWare and its enemies

VMware has maintained its lead in both virtualisation technology and market. Nevertheless, being a ‘one-product company’ – a contentious label – how will it battle the threat from open source and bundled-in virtualisation software?

Sam Dean at OStatic says free hypervisor is just the beginning of the virtualization walk. Given the complexity of the task – managing thousands of virtual servers and their workloads – CIOs need more help to complete their virtualisation journey. And that is precisely what VMware is focused on offering.

VMware already offers an impressive suite of management software. Its recent acquisition of Gemstone is the latest in the series of moves to woo developers to build value-added software to make VMWare platform more appealing.

Sam says ‘VMware remains a software story to watch. We would add, the virtualisation story is still unfolding as other vendors move in to target third party developers as well.