Paul Maritz hasn't had any easy job transition. A month ago he was a small part of the vast VMware empire; a few months before that, the head of his own small startup. Now he's the head of the virtualization industry flagship company, and is captaining a boat in rocky waters.
First came the dismissal of Diane Greene, in a manner that I still consider to be bush league. The bloodless coup that resulted in Greene being kicked to the curb was handled horribly. But that certainly isn't Maritz' fault; he just had the unenviable job of replacing a virtualization legend.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 08/13/20080 comments
Citrix, following in VMware's wake, announced a 10 percent price hike for many non-U.S. places, according to this
blog entry
. Now, since I took VMware
to task
for its price increase, it's completely fair to do the same with Citrix.
The situations aren't exactly the same, since the chief complaint about VMware is the price of its products (which have decreased recently with the new giveaway of its lightweight hypervisor, ESXi.) Citrix, until very recently, wasn't a player in the virtualization space, so there hasn't been a lot of time to complain.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 08/11/20081 comments
Hi, everyone. Didja miss me? (Most of you are probably thinking
You mean you were gone?
) I took a week off for a vacation with the family. Or, as my esteemed colleague
Scott Bekker
puts it, a "Stay-cation." We took a series of day trips around the region, which keeps costs down. In all, it was a great week.
We went to Washington D.C. and saw the Lincoln, World War II and Korean War memorials, then spent the balance of the day at the Air and Space Museum. Another day, we toured Annapolis, my hometown, and the kids got their first in-depth look at the Naval Academy (although the Chapel, holding the coffin of John Paul Jones, closed four minutes after we got their. Grrr.)
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Posted by Keith Ward on 08/11/20083 comments
As you may know, I'm a huge jazz fan (as opposed to a jazz fan who's huge). My good buddy
Eric Byrd
, about whom I
blogged
a long time ago, has a new album out that is climbing the jazz charts (and it's a wonderful listen). Way to go, Eric, Bhagwan, Al Young (my hero), and the Plus Four Horns. As for myself, I'm starting to work on the rudiments (and I mean
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/31/20082 comments
I'm a content guy, not a marketing guy, so I'll make this announcement with as little fluff and hype as possible:
THE GREATEST CONFERENCE IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IS GOING TO BE HELD DEC. 9-11 IN ORLANDO!!!!!!!!
How's that for understatement?
Joking aside (but only for a moment), we'll be holding our inaugural Virtualization Review conference on those dates (with a workshop day on Monday, Dec. 8) at the Gaylord Palms Hotel and Resort, a seriously swanky place. I'm conference chairman; what that means is that I get the blame if the show's lame. Actually, what it means, at least in the context of this show, is that I help shape the content that will be presented.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/29/20085 comments
Although I sense it will slip under the radar a little, today's a big day for the virtualization world, as
ESXi
is now available for free. As we reported
last week
, VMware decided to give away the lightweight version of its flagship hypervisor, ESX, as one of the company's first big moves under new CEO Paul Maritz.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/28/20086 comments
Lots to chew on following yesterday's
earnings call
/Q & A session with CEO Paul Maritz. First, CFO Mark Peek discussed why the company's earlier projections of 2008 revenue are going to fall so far short of projections. Then Maritz took over and discussed a number of issues related to future direction.
First things first: the big news, of course, is that ESXi is going to be given away, starting next week. This isn't exactly shocking news, as most of us expected something like that to happen sooner rather than later. Still, it's good news for the industry, and can only benefit VMware. More potential customers will now try ESXi; when they do a comparison, they will likely find that it's still the most advanced, stable hypervisor out there with the best functionality. The question will then become whether they can afford the superior management and infrastructure tools VMware provides on top of it.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/23/20082 comments
Virtualization Review Editor-in-Chief Doug Barney recently
asked
readers what they would do if they ran VMware in this new age of increased competition and upcoming price wars. He got some interesting responses, some of which are posted here.
"What would I do if I was VMware? PANIC."
- Anonymous
"Well, I would ultimately slash the price of the ESX products, give
away the Workstation and servers for free (but have fees for
support), add more hardware vendor support or alliance, and publish
more books or best practice guide documents."
- Cornelio
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/22/20086 comments
Hi everyone. It's been awhile since I blogged, which always makes me feel a wee bit guilty. I truly enjoy blogging and keeping the dialogue with you, the readers, going. But sometimes other work intrudes to a degree that it can't be helped.
In the case of last week and much of this, it's duties related to pumping out the magazine that's the main culprit. Our July/August issue is going to be sensational, but it's time-consuming. I hope (and think) that you'll find the tradeoff (less blogging in exchange for the magazine content) to be worthwhile.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/21/20082 comments
Over at virtualization.info, Alessandro Perilli is reporting that VMware is actually
raising the price
of all its products and subscriptions by 10 percent in Europe and Australia. If his reporting is correct (and it usually is), it makes me shake my head in wonder at the company's arrogance.
Raising prices? VMware? There is one complaint about VMware that eclipses all others, and it's the high price of its offerings. It's a minimum of $3,000 to add an ESX server to your infrastructure. Heck, even the non-UI version, the embedded ESXi, costs $500. Then there's the upsell, which Andrew Kutz points out in the July/August issue of our magazine is likely to end up costing you at least $5,750 if you want features like VMotion.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/11/200815 comments
Here's a nice resource for those of you using Hyper-V. It's a list of supported guests on a Hyper-V virtual machine host. Mostly Windows guests, with a few SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offerings, via the relationship with Novell.
Find the list
here
.
Posted by Keith Ward on 07/11/20085 comments
Executive Editor
Tom Valovic
and I would like to hear from VMware employees about what's happening inside the company right now. We absolutely guarantee to safeguard your anonymity. Please
e-mail me
or
Tom
as soon as you can, with appropriate contact information, and let us know you'd like to talk. Put "VMware employee" in the subject line, so we can make sure that your e-mail gets through, and gets read, as quickly as possible.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 07/09/20085 comments