In-Depth
The Telecom Market: Ripe for Virtualization?
VMware's acquisition of Trango is drawing mobile virtualization into the spotlight.
Is telecom the next big thing in virtualization? That's what at least some
observers think as the industry digests the news about VMware's purchase
of Trango Virtual Processors last October.
In virtualization, most of the telecom activity currently centers on mobile phones.
There are a handful of vendors that have staked a claim in this market including
VirtualLogix, Open Kernel Labs, HipLogix and Green Hills Software. But when
industry bellwether VMware took aim at this market segment with a formal
announcement in November, it suddenly became a bustling
boomtown.
How big is the market opportunity? Data projections are a bit hard to come
by as most industry analyst forecasts tend to focus on the IT market alone.
So far, telecom has been under the radar or, in some cases, has been treated
as simply another vertical market segment alongside financial or health care.
A market forecast of major virtualization segments developed by Credit Suisse,
for example, provided breakouts for application virtualization, desktop virtualization,
PC disk virtualization, presentation virtualization and server virtualization,
but nothing for telecom. Of course, telecom itself is a huge market.
The market that Trango and its competitors have been addressing is quite specific
and centers on the product development of mobile phones and PDAs. In many respects,
the timing couldn't be better. The mobile phone industry is going through an
upheaval because of the tendency for carriers such as AT&T and Verizon to
lock in customers with proprietary handsets. And it's the inflexibility of the
hardware which perpetuates that cycle.
Mobile handset manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola suffer from inflexible
product development constraints as a result of the fact that operating systems
are still married to hardware. With the current approach, software stacks will
not work across different phones and must be ported separately. When that changes
using virtualization -- essentially, the same type of virtualization available
for PCs on the desktop -- mobile phone vendors will not only be able to bring
products to market more quickly, they'll be able to innovate and perhaps better
compete with the likes of Apple and Google.
Trango's bare-metal hypervisor optimized for telecom applications (now rebranded
as VMware's Mobile Virtualization Platform or MVP) does just that, according
to Srinivas Krishnamurti, director of product management and market development
for VMware.
Right now, most of VMware's competitors in this space are smaller startups.
Microsoft has yet to make any major announcement about its intentions in this
market even though it is heavily involved in the mobile-device OS business.
Citrix, on the other hand, has recognized the value in this market opportunity
and is working on virtualization software that will securely migrate a Windows
desktop to an iPhone (this would apply to both XenApp and XenDesktop product
lines).
According to a research report from California-based analyst firm Pund-IT,
"The market for mobile virtualization is very small but its potential is
too large for serious vendors to ignore...we believe that VMware's MVP stands
to be the heaviest hitter in a game with virtually unlimited possibilities."
About the Author
Tom Valovic is a freelance technology writer.