8 PCs For the Price of One?
I recently spoke with Eli Segal, CEO of an Israeli-based company that has built what they call a next-generation PC.
Miniframe
was founded in 2003 and its SoftExpand product is essentially an out-of-the-box virtualized PC that doesn't use any hypervisor technology. The secret sauce is software that balances host PC resources between CPU and the video card's GPU. Additional LCD monitors share resources and applications and attach to the host via cabling and a USB hub.
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 07/21/20080 comments
So now we have a horse race.
Hyper-V is released
and we can begin to see the contours of what will be a new competitive landscape (although there are now, given
Diane Greene's departure
, many uncertainties about VMware's future to be resolved in the months ahead).
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 07/14/20083 comments
>Industry speculation reached fever pitch following EMC's
precipitous announcement
about the departure of Diane Greene from VMware as Wall Street hammered the stock, which closed down 25 percent the day after the announcement.
While theories abound, Greene's determination to maintain the autonomy of the company is well known. She has stated publicly her desire to disengage from EMC at some point in the future.
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 07/09/20080 comments
Diane Greene’s
exit from VMware
for the most part was a bolt out of the blue. Clearly many in the industry were caught by surprise including several analysts I spoke with. But companies, like virtual machines, also have lifecycles or more properly speaking maturity curves. They have to grow and evolve to stay competitive.
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 07/09/20080 comments
Analysts get paid to have opinions. Some observers think that those opinions have gotten too homogenized over the last several years, more groupthink is evident, and analysts as a community are in general more risk-aversive than they used to be.
There may be some truth to this. But the analysts that I’ve always admired as colleagues were those who didn’t mind taking a contrarian stance now and then. That’s why when I saw a research report suggesting that three vendors --- namely Cisco, VMware, and Citrix --- would dominate the virtualization market in the next year, it caught my eye.
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 07/08/20080 comments
The trade press and blogland are full of stories about Microsoft milestones (Bill Gates stepping down, Windows XP’s end of life, to name a few.) This is lending itself to much speculation about the company’s future direction, given any number of business model challenges and emerging technology opportunities.
The list is long, but for the moment let’s focus on things like cloud computing, SaaS and other trends being fully exploited by Google as it quietly (or maybe not so quietly) takes over the world. (I tend to think of Google as the brontosaurus in Jurassic Park -- a large beast of formidable proportions with a somewhat likable demeanor that disarmingly belies its great power. But come to think of it, that metaphor only captures a piece of it and lacks sufficient scope and scale, which is why I love the Doug Coupland meme “Is Google God?”)
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 06/30/20080 comments
In
a recent blog
I talked a bit about virtual sprawl and the sometimes counterintuitive economics of server virtualization.
Embotics
has put out an interesting white paper on this topic which addresses the question of whether VMs are really "free."
If you're doing server virtualization, the white paper points out that costs will typically cluster around four areas: infrastructure, management systems, server software and administration. For infrastructure, the more VMs, the more processing, memory, storage and networking for applications needed (ka-ching!). Additional software licensing adds to the tally, as well as increased costs for both management and administration (ka-ching again!)
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 06/26/20080 comments
On HP's Radar?
Shane Robison, HP's chief technology and strategy officer,
was recently interview by Newsweek on his thoughts about the company's overall
technology direction. While there was mention of HP's efforts in datacenter
automation and IT outsourcing, the subject of virtualization didn't come up
-- even in the context of a discussion about green IT. Curious...
A Few Data Points on Virtualization Planning. Cirba's cofounder and
CTO Andrew Hillier recently stopped by our offices to discuss the company's
latest product announcement, version 5.0 of its planning analysis software,
dubbed DCI.
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 06/24/20080 comments
If you happen to be a Star Trek fan, you might remember one of the more memorable episodes, “The Trouble with Tribbles”? And if you do, you won’t have any problem connecting the dots to virtual sprawl. This is a topic of no small interest to a company called Embotics. Editor Keith Ward and I recently spoke about it with David Lynch, VP of marketing for the Ottawa -based company.
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 06/19/20082 comments
At the risk of stating the obvious, one of the most critical issues about VMware’s future has to do with its strategy around pricing. There are some good reasons for the company to reassess at this point. For starters, there’s downward pricing pressure as a result of zero/low cost entry-level offerings such as Hyper-V and hypervisor commoditization.
Add to that more competition in general with Citrix coming on strong and moving into other segments such as application and desktop virtualization, as well as offerings from IBM and Oracle. And let’s not forget what some have described as “recessionary” forces that negatively impact IT spending.
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 06/16/20085 comments
"
We're drowning in information but starved for knowledge."
-- John Naisbitt
I used to be a great fan of John Naisbitt back in the day. And let's face it, the man has a great beard. I have no idea what he's up to these days although it would I suppose be easy enough to check [Editor's note: Here's a start, Tom]. In any event, I used the above quote in my second book Digital Mythologies (which is now sadly out of date but, thanks to Rutgers University Press, still in print.)
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 06/11/20080 comments
As you can well imagine, a magazine editor (i.e. human scanner) reads an enormous amount of material in the course of a week. One of the bloggers who is drawing my attention these days is Kevin Fogarty over at Computerworld. A recent posting of Kevin’s comparing VMware to Banyan, DEC, and Wordperfect was worth the price of admission. Here’s what he said:
I realize that it's a tradition in the computer industry, but I find it a little disappointing to see virtualisation giant VMware following the same competitive marketing obsession that made industry powerhouses of Banyan Systems, WordPerfect, Digital Equipment and Novell. Each of those companies, at one time, were considered absolutely dominant in their own markets and gradually lost those positions partially by focusing on the elegant engineering of their original product set and failing to recognise the point at which customers began to take that function for granted.
More
Posted by Tom Valovic on 06/10/20080 comments