If you step back for a moment and away from the breakneck speed with which the Internet and IT has developed over the last 15 years, you realize that IT in general is a still a very immature market. Mature markets have certain characteristics and one is that at some point seemingly endless cycles of innovation begin to fade. At the same time, technology curves, products, and end user familiarity and comfort levels with knowing how to actually use the products involved (there's a concept!) settles in to a known model with reasonably predictable characteristics.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/20/20080 comments
To get the kind of perspective on VMware’s Trango acquisition that only a competitor can provide, Editor Keith Ward and I recently spoke with one of the more visible companies in this space, VirtuaLogix. (Other competitors include Open Kernel Labs, HipLogix, and Green Hills Software.) Fadi Nasser, VP of product marketing, and Mike Seashols, chairman, provided some color on the deal from their vantage point. Being a competitor of course, the company has its own bias. Still, I thought the comments were useful.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/17/20080 comments
VMware’s acquisition of a small French start-up called Trango Virtual Processors signals a new direction for the company. But how big a deal is this? Trango is tiny, around 20 people. Nevertheless VMware being VMware, the move got its share of industry attention.
Trango’s product, an embedded bare metal hypervisor for virtualizing mobile devices, is called the Mobile Virtualization Platform or MVP. A key unanswered question right now is whether VMware/Trango is going after the same customer base that competitors like VirtualLogix are currently involved with. This includes mainstream telecom giants like Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, and NEC.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/16/20080 comments
Simtone
is an interesting company to watch. I’ll tell you why. They're way ahead of the thin client curve. But if the trends that they’re helping to jumpstart actually gain serious momentum (which could take a while…and of course they need to execute on their vision), the company could become successful very fast. The market? Mobile thin clients hosted by carriers along the lines of a Blackberry model and maybe even devices that can accommodate voice (although be advised that this latter is my own speculation…Mario Dal Canto, the company’s CEO, would not spill those particular beans with me in a recent conversation with both him and the company’s Senior EVP of Carrier Business Lorenzo Mejia).
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/12/20080 comments
Will virtualization catch on in the Mojave desert? How about in the North Dakota plains? I have no information whatsoever on these questions but virtualization is alive and well in the wilds of New Hampshire where VMware’s New England user group recently held a meeting. Why New Hampshire? I’m not sure but many of the attendees I met from Maine and New Hampshire were happy about the logistics.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/09/20080 comments
It’s always great to hear from readers and one of the most enjoyable parts of my job. Here’s a response that came in recently about the blog on Web 2.0 and VDI. It’s from Amy Hodler, who is Director of Product Management with a company called Tranxition.
“
I read your post…regarding the collision course between DaaS/VDI and Web 2.0 and appreciate your bringing up a trend that people are just starting to recognize and few seem to want to discuss it. I believe that “countervailing” trend you mention is larger in scope than you’ve pointed out in the article.
The reality is that people are performing personal tasks and storing personal items on work equipments and that creates risk and IT “drag.” What must evolve is a framework that acknowledges the behavior reality but protects the corporate assets. The lines between work and personal life have already become intertwined and technology (and IT processes) will eventually adapt, but as we are reactive creatures it might get worse before it gets better.
This issue has been on my mind for some time because of the nature of my work. I talk to a lot of customers, partners, analysts about how to best manage end user data/settings/state from an enterprise standpoint…and there’s a noticeable change in dialogue lately around serious management issues related to the collision of the personal and business tasks/software/platforms/behavior. It’s a very interesting trend and I have some ideas on where we will end up, but I’m not sure about what it will look like in the middle. Good article. “
Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/04/20080 comments
Ok I admit it. I’ve been remiss in sprinkling enough clever pop culture references into my blog posts. And being analyst for 9 years, I still have a tendency to slip into the ex cathedra mode of “analyst speak”. Old habits die hard, what can I say. I was reminded of this recently in reading a blog by my colleague right down the hall Lee Pender. Lee wrote a blog about unified communications which I enjoyed reading and referenced in another blog so I won’t do it again here. But I was also glad to see that Lee managed to work in a good Led Zeppelin reference into the blog since I also happen to be a musician and great Led Zeppelin fan. (In fact, my college roomate from Boston University back in the early paleolithic period is Steve Davis who wrote the bestselling book about Zep: “Hammer of the Gods”.) Now let’s see, what’s a good band to reference in conjunction with network virtualization? Hmm, let me think…
Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/03/20080 comments
You’ve undoubtedly heard the conventional wisdom that virtualization impacts just about everything in the kingdom of IT. I’ll have to say, based on the long list of vendors we have been talking to in the last several months, that this certainly seems to be the case. A lot of mainstream IT vendors have adapted their marketing strategies to the virtualization market and are selling into virtualized environments.
Zeus Technology is one of them. The company’s core product area is an application delivery controller called ZXTM that also incorporates load balancing capability. Customers include BT, China Telecom, and NASA. The product is available as software, hardware appliances, or as a virtual appliance for VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3 offering.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/02/20080 comments
According to Jeff Jennings, VP of Desktop Products and Solutions with VMware, the top three drivers for hosted desktop solutions are cost, management, and security. Improved security is especially useful in regulated industries like financial services and healthcare. With hosted desktop, security can be monitored more closely in the data center and virus threats reduced.
A item in Computerworld by Jim Duffy over at Network World sheds some interesting light on this problem. The article discusses “behavioral risks taken by employees in increasingly distributed and remote locations” and was commissioned by Cisco. The study, done by InsightExpress LLC, surveyed 2,000 employees and IT professionals in 10 countries focusing on security in the context of increasingly “untethered “work environments.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 10/26/20080 comments
Jeff Jennings who heads up VMware’s VDI solutions recently told me that he thinks something like 80% of desktop machines are candidates for virtualization. I told Jeff that seems high to me in light of the fact that at least one analyst firm was only projecting that 5% of desktops would be virtualized by 2011. But Jennings thinks that if the trend now seen in Asia towards employee-owned computers catches on, it could also fuel the the movement towards VDI adoption. He says the top three drivers that VMware is seeing for hosted desktop these days are cost, manageability, and security.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 10/26/20080 comments
As expected, Microsoft has released System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (Otherwise and far more succinctly known as VMM 2008.) more or less on schedule. VMM 2008 will compete head to head with VMware’s own management offering, VirtualCenter, rebranded as vCenter at this year’s VMworld. As Editor Keith Ward blogged about previously, this is a very important product for Microsoft as it works to establish its credibility and the richness of its virtualization portfolio.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 10/21/20080 comments
It's often hard for people outside of the slightly specialized world of distributed computing and data centers to get their heads around quite how critical and complex they have become. So I find the attention the media is now lavishing upon the data center industry to be bittersweet. “Sweet” because it certainly serves to put into perspective the dark art of data center computing. A recent article in the Economist noted that by 2010, the total number of servers in the U.S. is expected to grow to 15.8 million, located in 7,000 data centers nationwide – the biggest of which currently contain up to 80,000 servers each.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 10/20/20080 comments