Take Five With Tom Fenton

5 Virtualization Tips and Tricks to Take With You

• By Bruce Hoard
• 01/01/2012

There's nothing like good analyst quotes to perk up a story, and here are five of the best from the cover stories I've written this year.

TAKE 1
Chris Wolf, Research Vice President, Gartner Inc. (April-May Issue) Mark Tem-pleton's a great CEO. He gets the market extremely well. He said several years ago that the desktop space is Citrix's to lose. He thought that they were a bit ahead of their time with some of the technologies Citrix had built historically, and now, Citrix's core value-add is becoming mainstream, and in some places, the de facto option for new desktop deployments. Acquiring XenSource and getting the hypervisor, of course, was ex-tremely important for Citrix in the long term, and they've done a nice job of starting to build the ecosystem for XenServer and making the case to get XenServer in the datacenter, mostly as the back-end for XenDesktop workloads.

TAKE 2
Simon Bramfitt, Founder and Principal Analyst for Entelechy Associates (April-May Issue) There's a lot of doubt in my mind that Microsoft really is doing any more with desktop virtual-ization than the barest minimum. [Their] own desktop virtualization solution is excessively complex; it doesn't meet the needs of anything but the smallest percentage of Microsoft customers, and their unwillingness to sup-port any level of innovation when it comes to service delivery is a little disappointing. They were basically pushed into a corner with desktop virtualization through VMware's early initiative around [Virtual Desktop In-frastructure] and have been spinning ever since.

TAKE 3
Dave Bartoletti, Senior Analyst and Virtualization Lead, Taneja Group (June-July Issue) I do have to give credit to Microsoft because they have absolutely realized the importance of virtualization, and they didn't throw it out like a market-killing technology. They threw it out as a competitor. They listened to their customers and they're making it better. I think if you talked about this three years ago, a lot of analysts in the community thought that Hyper-V was just a way to kill virtualization while they figured out how to lock us all into Windows [OSes] for the rest of our lives. Give it away for free just like the browser wars, right?

TAKE 4
Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (August-September Issue) The thing that VMware is doing right is they're innovating amazingly. I think from an overall tech-nology innovation perspective, they've built a community, and they've got that community to really align with what they can offer. I hear very few, if any, complaints about VMware -- the technology or the company. I think their biggest challenge is taking where customers are today and advancing them. We've seen a massive wave of people achieving that first 20 percent to 30 percent level of virtualization, but that 20 to 30 percent isn't necessarily going to double in the next 12 months. That doubling is going to take a long time.

TAKE 5
Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners International (October-November Issue) What I've seen in the marketplace around mainframes is that maybe five years ago, just about everybody that I visited who had a mainframe was thinking about migrating off of it. They were concerned about the dearth of folks to manage them going forward and the high cost of software and so forth. But now it's turning out that what the cloud guys and the virtualization guys have done is underscore the real value proposition of mainframes, and many companies that were considering migrating their x86 workloads off mainframes are actually migrating x86 workloads onto there instead.