Shaking Things Up in the Virtualization Industry

As you probably know, VMware replaced its CEO this week. That's the news peg for a larger story by Richard Adhikari on InternetNews.com about VMware and the virtualization industry in general. You can't deny that the release of Hyper-V puts VMware under more pressure.

This comment by Andi Mann, research director at Enterprise Management Associates, caught my eye:

The average enterprise has 11 different virtualization technologies, platforms and vendors, and the environment will continue to be very heterogeneous, Mann said. "There's still lots of room for everyone to play and VMware had taken the attitude that they'd won, and you can't do that, especially when Microsoft has entered the market."

Our own Paul Rubens took a look at the Microsoft-VMware competition in the spring and asked if VMware could meet the same fate as Netscape. It's way too soon to be predicting something like that, but clearly consolidation will occur, and an increasing number of software vendors want a piece of the virtualization pie.

Also this week, a company called VDIworks announced VDIvision for System Center, which aims to bring desktop virtualization management capabilities to Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor.