VMware's News on vSphere 5 Has Competitors Scrambling
The imminent release of vSphere 5 was anything but a secret by the time VMware got around to formally announcing it this week, so it came as no surprise that Citrix, Microsoft and others also tried to steal some thunder by making news of their own.
Citrix got the ball rolling by unveiling the completion of its Cloud.com acquisition, which seemed to be a case of the company doubling down on open source cloud platforms -- CloudStack came along with Cloud.com, and Citrix recently joined Rackspace's OpenStack project.
The timing of the vSphere unveiling couldn't have come at a better time for Microsoft, which held its 2011 Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles this week. Highlights from that event included news that next week Redmond will release a new beta of the highly touted and long-awaited System Center 2012, and a sneak peek at the next version of Windows Server, aka Windows Server 8.
Microsoft also whipped up some gee-whiz numbers for the recently unveiled Office 365, saying that over 50,000 organizations have started trials of the cloud-based productivity service since it was introduced two weeks ago. This, Microsoft tells us, means that one trial has taken place every 25 seconds. Redmond did not, however, reveal how many copies of Microsoft Vista SP2 have been sold to date.
AppSense, another market leader that was recently on the receiving end of $70 million in funding from Goldman Sachs, took the wraps off version 8.1 of its AppSense User Virtualization Platform). Highlights included a new modular architecture, expanded policy and personalization capabilities, enhanced management and control, and end-user experience improvements.
Leostream also got in on the product parade by introducing its Leostream Cloud Desktops service, which was created to provide "reliable and secure cloud desktops for small and medium businesses and consumers, hosted on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud." The company claims its Leostream Cloud Desktops cost as little as $10 per month, adding they are also available daily or hourly for even less. Surely, this kind of pricing makes Leostream the no-tell motel of the desktop virtualization world.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/14/2011 at 12:48 PM