virtualization.info

In the last two years Cisco made at least two long-term key investments in the server market: invested over $150 million in VMware and became a player with its own blade system Unified Computing System (UCS).

Cisco wants to sell and interconnect next generation data centers. To do so it needs servers, storage, networking, software abstraction and software management.
EMC is helping with storage and software management, VMware is helping with software abstraction.

The three worked together for some months and then announced a formal coalition, that will sell these integrated data centers through channels and direct relationship with customers (through a company called Acadia).

The joint effort of these three companies may be just an elaborate (yet remarkable) marketing exercise, but it certainly had an impact on the market.

It may have forced IBM to attempt the acquisition of Sun (which ultimately went to Oracle).
It may have forced HP to buy 3Com for $2.7 billion.

HP is the company that has the most to lose because of the VMware-Cisco-EMC coalition considering that it currently sells 36% of all physical servers that will run virtualized workloads, and that it’s the leader in this segment, ahead of Dell and IBM.

Cisco may use VMware to slip into the enterprises where HP reigns, like it attempted to do on the VMworld 2009 data center.
If Cisco becomes a real threat, HP will need servers, storage, networking, software management and software abstraction to counter it.
The question is not if HP wants or not to adopt a strategy that is similar to the Cisco one. The question is how long before the Cisco plans will allow HP to play nice with all three major virtualization vendors instead of buying the only one it can?

Labels: 3Com, Acquisitions, HP

Despite its current size Liquidware Labs, the new company of David Bieneman, founder and former CEO of Vizioncore (acquired by Quest in January 2008), is demonstrating to be extremely aggressive.

The startup acquired VMSight in May, just before its public launch, and then opened a community portal at VDI.com (which is a notable investment considering the length and the relevance of the domain name) which collected over 1,000 subscribers in just a few weeks.

Now Liquidware Labs proceeds with a second acquisition: Entrigue Systems.

Entrigue is small US company founded in 2000 which offers a product called Script Start.
Script Start is able to create, provision and remotely manage the Windows user profiles (what the industry is now calling persona).
It also does other things like software/hardware inventory, but most of all it supports presentation virtualization environments like Citrix XenApp, VDI environments like VMware View and even enterprise desktop virtualization wrappers like Microsoft MED-V.

Entrigue used to offer an open source version of Script Start which lacks of some enterprise features. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem that Liquidware Labs saved this edition during the acquisition.

This move is extremely interesting. The technology acquired from VMsight puts Liquidware Labs in the area of VDI optimization, not persona management. So why the company needs a product like Script Start?
It is entirely possible that Liquidware Labs is working to build some sort of automation to glue together the two things: the data collected by Stratusphere about the user activity in VDI environments could be analyzed to recognize the root cause of the bottlenecks and, according to that, the user profile could be optimized by ProfileUnity to improve the experience.

If so expect Liquidware Labs to acquire a company in the scripting/automation space soon, or at least announce a new product suite in the coming months.

Labels: Acquisitions, Entrigue Systems, LiquidWare Labs, VDI

At the beginning of this week VMware announced the acquisition of SpringSource for $420 million ($362M in cash and $58M in unvested stock and options).

The company tried to clarify the deal with a public presentation  hosted for its investors and an article published by Steve Herrod, the company CTO, on his corporate blog:

VMware has traditionally treated the applications and operating systems running within our virtual machines (VMs) as black boxes with relatively little knowledge about what they were doing. However, whether it’s around speed of deployment, application performance guarantees, or providing resiliency in the face of component outages, we will be able to provide even more capabilities as we bring even more knowledge of the application and infrastructure layers together. We will do this by adding interfaces into vSphere that SpringSource offerings (and other application frameworks) can take advantage of and by extending our management and automation capabilities to be aware of these interactions. A lot of our early “vApp” thinking has been based on this separation of application code from the requirements it has on the infrastructure on which it will be running.

This is the largest acquisition in VMware’s history and the most complex to evaluate as it radically changes the company mission and market position.

Easy to predict, that part of the worldwide press that doesn’t just republish press announcements is still trying to figure out the sense of this investment.
Surprisingly, the announcement led to an unexpected number of negative comments, some of them completely unrelated to the acquisition (like this one and this one).
The financial analysts highlighted the high price, and the investors didn’t seem too impressed so far:

Who is SpringSource
SpringSource is a small company (157 employees as reported by LinkedIn) founded in 2004 and funded with $25M in two investment rounds (led by Benchmarks Capital and Accel Partners).

The firm offers a Java framework called Spring to develop enterprise-grade applications that can run on Java application servers like Tomcat. The company claims that Spring has been adopted by almost 50% of Global Fortune 2000 and Gartner estimates that 2 million developers use it.
SpringSource also offers its own version of the Tomcat application server, called tc Server, and its own version of the Apache web server, called Enterprise Ready Server (ERS).
The company even offers its own Java application server: dm Server.

Both the Spring framework and the dm Server are available as open source (and VMware already said that it plans to keep this model).

In May 2009 SpringSource acquired Hyperic, an infrastructure management firm that offers products (HQ and IQ) for every major operating system (from Microsoft Windows to IBM AIX), every major application platform (from LAMP to Microsoft .NET) and every major enterprise service (from Microsoft Exchange to Oracle Database) on the market.
The Hyperic solution also monitors VMware and Citrix virtual infrastructures and the Amazon implementation of Xen.
For each supported product Hyperic can do a wide array of activities, from auto-discovery to real-time health monitoring, from capacity planning to event tracking and alerting, up to granular reporting.

Even here SpringSource has a big tap into the open source world as the Hyperic management platform is also available in a open source edition.

In total the company may score around $20M in sales as CNET suggests.

Where VMware position itself now
It seems clear that for VMware virtualization is no more about virtual machines, and not even about enterprise virtualization management.

A few months ago virtualization.info speculated on the fact that VMware is turning into an infrastructure management company, getting ready to compete against the big four: BMC, CA, HP and IBM.
VMware already has a lot of technologies that could easily extend to the physical world. And the Hyperic management suite is a new, big piece of the puzzle.

So while the possibility to control the physical layer gets more concrete every day, VMware also has to move forward with its cloud computing plan.
In 2006 virtualization.info suggested that VMware may want to shift its focus on the cloud computing space to avoid a direct competition against Microsoft and its free hypervisor. The idea at that time was that the Microsoft slowness in entering new markets would give VMware more time to further consolidate its position. But something unexpected happened: Microsoft was quicker than usual in embracing cloud computing and announced Azure.

With Hyper-V Microsoft is able to empower any Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud provider. 
With Azure, it can also empower Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud providers, or become one by itself.
Last but not least, with the upcoming version of Office online and a number of hosted services (from Exchange to SharePoint), Microsoft also becomes a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud provider.

If Microsoft can efficiently and quickly combine Hyper-V with Azure and port most of its products online, then it will become a global cloud computing provider much earlier than expected.
And this may be a good reason for VMware to accelerate its plan, by investing $20M in the hosting provider Terremark (equal to a 5% stake) and now trying to integrate IaaS and PaaS clouds.

Of course the executives in Redmond are downplaying the upcoming competition, or at least this is what the Corporate Vice President for Microsoft's Management and Services Division, Brad Anderson, did during the last investors meeting:

…I look at that [VMware-SpringSource deal] as a response to what Microsoft has been communicating in the market about the application architecture," Anderson said in a Webinar. "But I think they're moving into a space that really is away from what their core competency is, and moving into a space where, if you look at what Microsoft has with Visual Studio, I think Microsoft has a lot of strength there…

Ultimately, even if the company doesn’t admit it (and there are evident reasons to do so), it seems that VMware is trying to take full control of the physical, virtual and cloud space, leaving to its customers just the bother to plug in their applications (and if they plug-in a Java application rather than a .NET one it’s even better).

If true it’s a dreaming plan: these are the building blocks of a fully autonomic computing environment, which still seems so incredibly far away.
Such ambitious plan would also explain very well why Cisco is so interested in VMware and invested $150 Million in it. 
At the right moment (read: when it’s ready to compromise its relationship with Microsoft) Cisco may even decide to acquire VMware and connect the dots.

Of course the risk of such plan is that VMware tries to do too much altogether and too quickly, which may translate into a poor execution.

Who are the new competitors
Excluding Microsoft (already discussed above), Google and Salesforce (which are not interested in the IaaS layer as far as we know) there are not many companies that may compete with VMware on this new game.

Citrix has a well-defined vision of how to optimize end-to-end the application delivery process but at the moment it’s not something that involves the full control of the physical layer or a PaaS architecture.

Cisco may be everything but a competitor considering its interest in serving and interconnecting the software platforms that VMware offers.

The only major vendor that has the pieces and the money to become an infrastructure management company with full control of the cloud is Oracle.

With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle has even more than what VMware has today: a full computing stack, including physical servers, storage and thin clients, no less than three hypervisors, an enterprise-grade operating system, several application servers, widely adopted back-end services, a management platform to control everything mentioned so far, and even a dormant IaaS and PaaS infrastructure.
And yes, Oracle has a significant control on the Java language too.

It must be seen if Oracle also has the ambition to become what VMware is trying to become.

Labels: Acquisitions, SpringSource, VMware

Five weeks ago Oracle announced the acquisition of Virtual Iron for an undisclosed sum. So far the company didn’t reveal if and how it plans to to merge the Virtual Iron hypervisor with the Sun xVM hypervisor and with its own Oracle VM Server.
Now finally the database giant starts to unveil its strategy.

The Register has just broken the news about an official communication released by Oracle to the Virtual Iron partners:

…In a letter to Virtual Iron's sales partners, Oracle says it "will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers." And in a second letter to a partner speaking with The Reg, the company says it will not allow partners to sell new licenses to anyone - including existing customers - after the end of this month (i.e. in 11 days). Before then, partners can only sell licenses to existing customers under certain conditions.

…

When the integrated product becomes generally available, Virtual Iron customers will be able to move to the new, integrated product and benefit from a more feature rich-solution than is available today…

The Register also unveils that the Virtual Iron company has been almost completely fired:

…In its letter, the company says "Oracle has retained Virtual Iron support personnel, so the same people who provided support prior to the acquisition will continue to do so going forward." But our source says the company has let go all but about ten people from VI's staff, and that two are on temporary contracts…

Now we have to wait and see if Sun xVM business unit will suffer the same destiny.

Labels: Acquisitions, Oracle, Virtual Iron

After the acquisition of some of the jewels of the IT industry, like VMware (in 2003 for $635 million) and RSA (in 2006 for $2.1 billion), plus an endless number of other interesting vendors, EMC slowed down its pace in 2008. But the worldwide financial crisis represents a great time to restart the shopping season and close amazing deals.

So last week EMC announced the acquisition of Configuresoft, a configuration management company that started to focus on virtualization and VMware in early 2008.
The price paid for this deal was not disclosed.

The main reason behind the operation is the OEM relationship which already exists between the two companies, where EMC is selling Configuresoft technologies as Server Configuration Manager (SCM) and Configuration Analytics Manager (CIA).
But considering that EMC is the parent company of VMware, parts of the Configuresoft intellectual property may go to the subsidiary which may find them extremely useful to enrich its vCenter Suite.

Labels: Acquisitions, Configuresoft, EMC

David Bieneman, the man that founded Vizioncore, sold it to Quest in January 2008, and left just two months after the acquisition, is back.

Of course the strict agreements that regulate an acquisition prevent him from starting or working for a company that compete with Quest/Vizioncore.
So Bieneman is now moving in a new virtualization segment space with a startup called Liquidware Labs.

With him there is J. Tyler Rohrer, the former founder of Foedus, a successful consulting company that was acquired by VMware in January 2008.
Roher left VMware after working for almost one year and a half in the Enterprise Desktop team (the one responsible for VMware View).

The company tagline, The Art & Science of the Desktop, and the Roher profile on LinkedIn unveil that Liquidware Labs will be active in the VDI space, will address the PSO organizations, and that will leverage the technology of vmSight, recently acquired while in stealth mode for an undisclosed sum.

vmSight is a startup that offers a solution to track how the users work on the virtual desktops, through the analysis of their network activity.
Think about it as a network sniffer that re-assembles the snooped packets to understand the history and the performance of a VDI session and make it easier to troubleshoot.

What Liquidware Labs will do with this technology which is covered by 13 patents?
Roher is very clear on the market strategy:

Going to assist the market with purpose built tools to enable the adoption, consumption, and scalability of VDI projects.
I believe before we build it, we need to design it, and before we design it, we need to assess what "it" needs to be.
PSO Focus and Application First methodology

While waiting for the official launch of Liquidware Labs, we can bet on the chance of turn this new company in another successful acquisition.

Thanks for Lanamark (which will actually compete with Liquidware Labs) for making this story public.

Liquidware Labs has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Labels: Acquisitions, LiquidWare Labs, VDI, vmSight

In mid-March the Wall Street Journal broke the news about an ongoing acquisition discussion between IBM and Sun. The deal never happened and IBM walked away retiring a $7 billion offering.
At this point Oracle jumped in and acquired Sun for $7.4 billion.

For the virtualization industry this is a very interesting move.

Sun is finalizing an entire virtualization portfolio, the xVM family, that includes a much delayed hypervisor based on Xen (Server), an enterprise management solution (Ops Center), a connection broker (VDI) and even a desktop virtualization solution (VirtualBox).
On its end, Oracle announced its own virtual infrastructure in November 2007, which includes a Xen-based hypervisor (VM Server) available free of charge and an enterprise management solution (VM Manager).

So far Oracle kept a low profile and didn’t seriously push its presence in the virtualization market, at the point that most people believe that Oracle VM is just for Oracle workloads. But the company strategy is very different: the database vendor wants to become a fully accredited virtualization vendor and compete with its former partner VMware.

So far Sun has played very nice with VMware (for example, by giving priority to ESX over xVM Server inside Sun VDI) but Oracle is all but friendly with the virtualization player and the attacks are intensifying.

With this acquisition Oracle gets the entire Sun virtualization portfolio, and its entire computing stack (servers, storage, hypervisor, operating system, management layer, connection broker, etc.).
If Oracle plays well its cards here in a couple of years it may become a dangerous competitor for VMware.

Another implication of this deal is that Oracle doesn’t need Virtual Iron anymore.
In the past weeks virtualization.info reported about rumors of a possible acquisition.

Of course the deal has several implications that are not related to virtualization.
One is that Oracle may finally cut its dependence on Red Hat and its Enterprise Linux in favor of Solaris.
Another, which will have a much bigger impact, is that MySQL (acquired by Sun in January 2008) may change into something completely different.

Labels: Acquisitions, Oracle, Sun

Even if the amount of technical details about the upcoming Unified Computing System (UCS) blade system are scarce, it’s clear that Cisco has a plan.
And this plan doesn’t contemplate to just sell x86 servers against HP, IBM and Dell.

It doesn’t matter what Cisco believes it can deliver on the market, the hardware part doesn’t seem the most relevant thing.
The biggest question about UCS is how the network vendor is gluing together BMC and VMware products with its UCS Manager.
Whatever is the the method, Cisco has already found it cause UCS is set to be launched this month, very likely the same day of VMware vSphere 4.0, expected for April 21.

So why Cisco has to buy Tidal Software for $105 million in cash and retention-based incentives?

Tidal does job scheduling, application performance management, and automation software products. But these things should already come with BMC and VMware products.

Maybe Cisco is preparing to offer an orchestration suite for 3rd party platforms that will come in the second wave of supported solutions for UCS (namely Microsoft, Red Hat, etc.).
Maybe Cisco doesn’t fell secure enough with just a technology partnership with BMC and wants to have its own toolbox.
Maybe some limitations in the current UCS software stack emerged during the beta phase and Cisco is trying to fill the partners gaps on its own.
Maybe the Cisco plan is much more complex than what appears today and its competitors should pay attention.

We were at the HP Campus in Houston earlier this week and the company executives didn’t seem to underestimate the newcomer.

Labels: Acquisitions, Cisco

Less than one month ago The Wall Street Journal broke the news of an ongoing acquisition talk between IBM and Sun.

virtualization.info reported about the early involvement of Cisco in the bid for Sun, a rumor never confirmed by other sources.

Earlier this week the New York Times reported that the discussion between IBM and Sun has ended and that IBM withdrew its $7 billion offering.

If Cisco was really interested in Sun, now it may be a good moment to reopen the negotiations.

As many pointed out, if Cisco really wants to emerge as a leading player in the server market, it needs all the experience, the credibility and the customers that it can have.
Building all the three things from scratch may take several years, even for a giant like the networking vendor.

Sun can provide all and a virtualization portfolio that may become useful if, for any reason, the intimate partnership with VMware gets compromised.

And by the way, after this failed bid, acquiring Sun is probably much cheaper than one month ago.

Update: It seems that the discussion is still open between Sun and IBM.

Labels: Acquisitions, Alliances, Cisco, IBM, Sun

Just yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM is bidding to acquire Sun.

Many believes that IBM may want Sun to consolidate its position in the virtualization and cloud computing space before Cisco Systems gets any market share with its upcoming Unified Computing System. But the Cisco involvement in this bid be be much deeper than that.

Several rumors (none of them coming from trusted virtualization.info sources anyway) suggest that Cisco was already in discussion to acquire Sun before IBM came in.

Many have spotted a similarity between the Sun server chassis and the new Cisco UCS chassis (here an example) and started wondering if between the two have an OEM agreement in place to manufacture the UCS hardware.

Design analogy or not (it doesn't seem so evident honestly), at least one of the rumors that confirms the discussion between Cisco and Sun comes from inside Cisco itself.
And this would have forced IBM to enter the bid to block Cisco.

A number of people (like the influential Om Malik at GigaOM) believes that Sun belongs to Cisco much more than to IBM.

Labels: Acquisitions, Cisco, IBM, Sun

In the last two years Virtual Iron has been frequently mentioned as an acquisition target in rumors about Novell, Symantec and other big IT vendors.
The last one comes from Jeffried & Co. analyst Catherine Egbert who suggested that Virtual Iron is being acquired by Oracle.

The rumor was picked up by several news sites, including LocalTechWire, ITBusinessEdge and The Register.
virtualization.info reached out both companies but, as expected, Oracle answered that the company doesn’t comment on press stories while Virtual Iron didn’t answer at all.

Does Oracle need Virtual Iron? If we listen to Larry Ellison the answer is no.
But it’s not because Oracle is not interested in becoming a global virtualization player. Quite the opposite.

The Oracle CEO once said that his cat could write the VMware hypervisor and to prove it in November 2007 his company released its own virtualization platform: Oracle VM.

Maybe Ellison overlooked the challenges that come when you want to develop and sell a mission-critical virtual machine monitor (VMM) because so far Oracle VM failed to gain any relevant market share.
The Oracle hypervisor comes free since day one and it’s based on Xen, but it didn’t turn all the heads that Citrix is turning with its upcoming free XenServer.
One of the reasons behind this lack of interest is that Oracle, exactly like Citrix, is not recognized as a virtualization vendor and has to develop a huge marketing action to change this perception.

Another reason why Oracle may be changing its plans to go solo and look for the acquisition of Virtual Iron is to not lose control on the development of Xen.
After Citrix acquired XenSource, some key contributors of the open source hypervisor went away: one of them is IBM, another is Red Hat which will extensively adopt KVM in H2 2009.
The major contributors that are still developing Xen may either jump on the KVM bandwagon or ally with Citrix, influencing the features and roadmap of the hypervisor to slow down Oracle.

So it’s possible that Oracle needs a virtualization vendor more than what originally expected.
For sure Virtual Iron has the knowledge, the technology and the brand to make Oracle VM more relevant in the virtualization space and influence the Xen roadmap in a useful way.

Labels: Acquisitions, Oracle, Virtual Iron

Rumors of a possible EMC/VMW acquisition by Cisco has resurfaced.

virtualization.info has discovered some circumstantial evidence which combined could mean that something huge is about to go down.

• Cisco is raising cash for possible acquisitions, as reported earlier today.
• Yesterday’s SEC filing is evidence that someone is hoarding VMware shares.
• At Cisco Networkers 2009 a tighter Cisco/VMware/EMC strategy was evident.

Monday’s SEC filings shows that Cisco posted a prospectus on raising $4 billion in senior bonds. The book building is run by all the major investment banks and is closing on February 17.
Cisco must be really confident for such a major issuance in these market conditions, but Standard & Poors is giving the senior unsecured notes an A+ rating with a stable outlook.
Cisco will use $500 million of the $4 billion to repay short term debt.  When combined with sizeable cash holdings, this leaves them with with $4.7 billion in cash at the US parent company. According to CNET that amount excluded cash holdings at subsidiaries overseas.

That is not enough for a full takeover as the market cap of EMC is around $25 billion and VMware about $10.5 billion, but a possible stock swap with a cash settlement sprinkled on top could certainly interest EMC investors (Cisco currently hold 1.7% of the total outstanding stock).

VMware holds about $1.8 billion in cash, so a possible deal could be $6.5 billion in cash and $6-7 billion in Cisco stock (Cisco would have to pay at least a 20% premium here).

EMC holds about $5.8 billion in cash and $1 billion in short term investments,for a combined $8.2 billion (with 84% VMware ownership) in cash equivalent. A possible deal could then be $13 billion in cash and $15-17 billion in Cisco stocks.

Another piece of the (possible) puzzle is some interesting moves in VMware stock holders lately.

When a company acquire above 5% of the outstanding shares in a public company, US laws require them to file a SEC 13G form, reporting their interest to the stock market.
It must also be clearly understood that the party acquiring the stake in the company is only a passive investor, and does not intend to exert control.

The 13G must be filed within 10 days after acquiring the stocks.
On February 10 UBS filed on behalf of several accounts.
These are usually anonymous investment accounts so we do not know who is hiding behind UBS, but surely someone thinks VMware is a good investment.

The holdings made public are:

This is a total of 26,078,227 shares, representing 6.7% of the outstanding shares.

The reason for the different percentages is due to EMC chose to split the VMW shares in two stock classes when it took VMware public in 2007.
The shares have different voting rights and are divided in class A and B common shares.
Even though just 90,448,000 shares are listed on NYSE, there are a total of 389,602,066 outstanding.
EMC still owns 327,000,000 shares, representing 83,4% of the company.
This means UBS clients are currently controlling about a quarter of the NYSE listed shares.

VMware had a profit of $290 million on revenues of $1.9 billion in 2008.
With a valuation of $10.5 billion that represents a P/E in the low thirties, a very high number.
If we look at the pure financials and EMC's controlling stake, VMware is simply not worth this even with a projected 50% growth rate.
It is still far better than the P/E the company had when it was valued at $45 billion in October 2007.

But for Cisco, both VMware and EMC would have a significant strategic value.
With cloud computing portrayed as the future of computing, a merger with EMC would be a perfect match.

Cisco are already partnering with Dell, EMC and VMware, they would be able to provide a single vendor solution of the entire stack with an OEM deal with Dell.

Cisco have already very thigh integration between Vframe and VMware vCenter. They could provide the 10,000 feet management and automation platform, with a unified I/O fabric with some distributed storage at the back end from a single vendor.
So maybe the upcoming Cisco blade system codename California is more than just the result of a business partnership.

A Cisco/EMC/VMware entity would offer a very compelling cloud computing platform, even though they don't control an API like Amazon web services, Google Apps or Microsoft Azure.

Labels: Acquisitions, Cisco, EMC, VMware

Last week mainstream news magazines Network World and Business Journal suggested that two major IT vendors, Novell and Dell, are ready to make some acquisitions in the virtualization space.

Network World is reporting the Novell President and CEO’s words:

...Novell is now planning to extend the technology to provide tools to users that will enable them to move workloads from virtual environments to a cloud computing model…

Business Journal instead is speculating that Dell may want to acquire Egenera, countering the HP’s acquisition of Opsware:

Dell officials have suggested that it’s time for the company to do more deals to expand its revenue base to compete with rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp.
The question is: Will it gamble on large acquisitions or continue with a track record of relatively conservative deals?

On top of the rumors above, this week CNET is reporting that Cisco plans to sell $4 billion in bonds to raise some cash.
Part of this money ($500 million) will be used to pay floating rate debt. The rest could be used to buy some somebody at the virtualization shopping mall.

CNET goes as far as suggesting that Cisco may want to buy EMC, but that’s definitively more expensive than $3.5 billion.

Labels: Acquisitions, Cisco, Dell, Egenera, EMC, Novell

The expansion of Quest in the virtualization space isn’t finished yet: after acquiring Invirtus in June 2007 (which was merged with Vizioncore), Provision Networks in November 2007 (which is now Quest Desktop Virtualization Group) and the remaining part of Vizioncore in January 2008 (which will be Quest Server Virtualization Group sooner or later), the company wants an abstraction layer for the storage and announces today the acquisition of MonoSphere.

MonoSphere is a storage vendor that approached the world of virtualization in early 2008, introducing the idea of dark storage: the storage space wasted by inefficient capacity allocation.

The company states that customers waste on average 30% of storage despite the yearly spending raises of 10% to 15% every year.

The raw storage becomes configured storage, then it's mapped to a host server (allocated storage), then it's recognized by the hardware (claimed storage), then it's presented as volumes (assigned storage), and finally is used by the applications (used storage).
At each step MonoSphere recognizes inefficiency which prevent the optimal allocation of 90-95% of the available space.

MonoSphere joined in February 2008 the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program and supported ESX in its product.

Quest already said that MonoSphere Storage Horizon will continue to exist, but it also said that the product will be integrated with several others in its portfolio.
Easy to guess, one of the first will be vFoglight (formerly esxCharter and then vCharter): the Vizioncore flagship product for performance monitoring and troubleshooting.

Labels: Acquisitions, MonoSphere, Quest

It’s more than clear that Sun doesn’t want to be a secondary player in the emerging markets, most of all in the virtualization and cloud computing ones.

In the virtualization space the company is developing its own hypervisor, based on Xen, and an enterprise management system that could rival with VMware vCenter.
Unfortunately both xVM Server 1.0 and Ops Center 2.0 are terribly in late and the customers’ hopes to have an open source hypervisor with enterprise-grade support within a reasonable amount of time are fading away.

Sun is also moving to build a concrete presence in the cloud computing space: its general purpose grid computing facility Network.com is being upgraded, probably to mimic the wildly popular Amazon EC2.

And now the company announces the acquisition of Q-layer, a European company offering a management platform, called NephOS, that simplifies the on-demand provisioning of discrete servers, as well as networks and storage resources, and offers per-user chargeback capabilities.

It seems very likely that the next version of Network.com may feature NephOS to further compete with Amazon.

Labels: Acquisitions, Q-layer, Sun

Today Phoronix broke the news that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics.

The little company is behind the development of hugely popular Linux graphics technologies like:

• Mesa3D, the OpenGL component used by the X Window System
• Gallium3D, a software library for 3D graphics drivers
• TTM Manager, a video memory manager

So far VMware didn’t confirm the news or unveiled the amount of the acquisition, but the news is reported on the official website of the new subsidiary.

It seems pretty clear that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics to power its upcoming client hypervisor, a key part of its pervasive VDI strategy vCloud, where every centrally-managed virtual machine can be checked out and executed locally.

Running a hypervisor on consumer hardware like laptops granting all functionalities that the real hardware provides, like 3D rendering, requires some remarkable engineering work.
Several companies are walking the same path, including Phoenix Technologies, Neocleus and Citrix but none of them acquired yet a company that masters the art of graphics acceleration.

With Tungsten Graphics VMware reaches twelve acquisitions:

11. Trango Virtual Processors (mobile hypervisor)

10. Blue Lane Technologies (intrusion prevention system)

9. B-hive (performance monitoring)

8. Thinstall (application virtualization)

7. Foedus (consulting services)

6. Sciant (software development)

5. Dunes Technologies (virtual data center orchestration)

4. Determina (intrusion prevention system)

3. Propero (virtual desktop infrastructure)

2. Akimbi (virtual lab automation)

1. Asset Optimization Group (capacity planning)

Labels: Acquisitions, Tungsten Graphics, VMware

IBM announced today its intention to acquire Transitive, the company that offers an emulation layer (billed as cross-platform virtualization) to run applications on non-native hardware platform.

The company’s engine is behind the Apple Rosetta software that runs Mac OS applications for IBM PowerPC CPUs on Intel x86.
Transitive is also able to translate Sun Solaris applications developed SPARC architecture in a way that they can run on Linux on any x86/x64 or on Intel Itanium architecture.

In January 2008 Transitive also powered a special PowerVM Lx86 software offered by IBM, which allows to run Linux applications developed for any x86 architecture on IBM System p platforms with Power CPUs.

Probably IBM found the solution so interesting that decided to acquire the company.
The entity of the acquisition is unknown.

Labels: Acquisitions, IBM, Transitive

In the last months virtualization.info reported several times that virtualization vendors were moving to attack the mobile and embedded devices market.
We mentioned the Samsung effort to port Xen on ARM processors, the Qumranet plans to distribute KVM as part of any Linux mobile, and even the prediction of the Citrix Vice President of Advanced Products.

Now VMware confirms 100% the trend acquiring one of the very few players in this emerging market: Trango Virtual Processors.

Right now the Trango hypervisor supports an interesting (but very limited) range of real-time OSes, including: Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x, Symbian 9.x, eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II.

Through Trango, VMware plans to release a Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), probably a scaled-down, optimized version of ESX for embedded devices powered by ARM CPUs (like the new Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9).

Of course VMware doesn’t say when the mobile revolution will happen as there’s a couple of complex issues to solve:

• First of all the fact that customers can run a Windows XP virtual machine on their phones doesn’t mean that it’s usable. So the mobile market has to release a device able to satisfy certain requirements (what Citrix calls the Nirvana phone since a long time).
  It’s just our opinion but to interact with a guest OS this device should be something like an Apple iPhone or a Nokia Internet Tablet but much bigger (probably 4 times the iPhone or 2-3 times the Internet Table).
• Secondarily, the vendors producing the real-time OSes (Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Palm and now Google) must accept the fact that their platforms are virtualized and provide support accordingly.
  This is going to be the same slow, painful process already experienced when VMware first introduced its products for server virtualization.

Despite these two issues seem huge to address right now Gartner is optimistic and predicts that by 2012 more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized.

If true the virtualization vendors that want to compete with VMware will have to build the necessary know-how very fast, possibly acquiring Trango competitors.
A very interesting one is VirtualLogix which has a solid position and it’s funded by Intel.

The Gartner prediction has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions.

Labels: Acquisitions, Market Trends, Trango, VMware

virtualization.info has just learned that VMware acquired the security vendor Blue Lane Technologies.

The company, popular for its inline patching technology, entered the virtualization market at the beginning of 2007 and completely refocused its effort around the VMware Infrastructure over the last two years.

Like all its competitors, their VirtualShield, is still unable to provide a special integration with the ESX hypervisor and requires a traditional VM-to-VM interaction: the product must be installed inside a virtual machine that acts as a proxy and the virtual networking must be reconfigured to point all protected virtual machines to it.

The advent of the security APIs called VMsafe, that VMware should introduce next year with VI4, would dramatically change the scenario, finally allowing Blue Lane to transparently protect the virtual infrastructure without any reconfiguration.
But this may be no more necessary now that VMware acquired it.

This acquisition confirms one again the extreme commitment of the company in the security space. In the last year in fact VMware started investing in multiple ways in the security space:

• (August 2007) VMware signs an OEM agreement with Shavlik Technologies to use their patching engine into the VI 3.5 Update Manager
• (August 2007) VMware acquired Determina
• (February 2008) VMware announces VMsafe

With Blue Lane VMware reaches nine acquisitions (at least counting the public ones).
The last one was B-hive in May 2008 (its technology will appear in VI4 as well under the name of AppSpeed).

More details about the deal available as soon as possible.

Labels: Acquisitions, Blue Lane, Security, VMware

In August PHD Technologies, the US startup focused on virtual machines backup and recovery, secured an undisclosed amount of new funds.
Part of the money were used to appoint a new CEO and a new EVP of Worldwide Sales. Another part is now used to acquire the software department of Xtravirt, a consulting firm based in UK.

With this move PHD Technologies obtained a wide range of tool, covering several aspects of VMware infrastructures management: mass-configuration of ESX hosts, patch management, virtual machine backup and restore, and even a virtual SAN solution.

Additionally, the Xtravirt co-founder Alex Mittell joined PHD Technologies as Director of Research & Development.
Now the company has a chance to expand its business in many segments, mimicking the growth in popularity and size that companies like Veeam enjoyed so far.

Labels: Acquisitions, PHD Technologies

Multiple bidders are currently running for the FastScale acquisition, as virtualization.info has learned from mutliple sources.

FastScale is a US startup launched almost one year ago, funded by ATA Ventures, Leapfrog Ventures and Hunt Ventures, which offers an innovative approach to reduce the overall virtual machine size.

In the last two years, much before the public launch, the company tightly worked with VMware, probably to shape its solution in a way that would fit the virtualization giant's strategy for virtual appliances.
This is the reason why virtualization.info (wrongly) speculated a FastScale acquisition by VMware in January 2008.

It's unknown if VMware is part of the ongoing acquisition bid now. The only name reported so far is Sun.
The other FastScale partners (HP, IBM, Microsoft and Red Hat) may be part of the bid as well.

Labels: Acquisitions, FastScale, Sun

Just yesterday virtualization.info published the news about a possible acqusition of VMware in the application virtualization market, speculating that the acquired firm could be FastScale.

The official announcement comes today, clarifing the actual acquired company and the company strategy behind the move:

VMware, Inc. , the virtualization software leader, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Thinstall, a privately-held application virtualization software company headquartered in San Francisco. VMware is acquiring Thinstall to expand its desktop virtualization capabilities which help customers better provision, deploy and update desktop environments. The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed in the current fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed...

The acquisition of Thinstall and its use for VDI scenarios extended the competition front with Microsoft (which acquired Softricity application vendor in June 2006) and Citrix, and brings the company a notable set of OEM partnerships: with LANDesk (March 2007), with Provision Networks (July 2007), with BMC (September 2007) and with Macrovision (October 2007).

Given the strong focus of Thinstall on Microsoft platforms, the acquisition seems to validate an important point, often emerging in surveys: large majority of virtual machines contains Windows guest OSes.

At the same time this acquition validates once and forever the fact that application virtualization is considered one of the next mainstream technology for most major players: before VMware, Microsoft acquired Softricity, Citrix acquired Ardence, Symantec acquired Altiris and even Google acquired GreenBorder.

Thinstall is the 7th acquisition for VMware. Before it the virtualization player acquired Akimbi (June 2006), Propero (April 2007), Determina (August 2007), Dunes Technologies (September 2007), Sciant (October 2007) and Foedus (January 2008).

If the trend continues VMware will acquire a new company per month.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Acquisitions, VMware