virtualization.info

Last week, along with the acquisition of RTO Software assets, VMware also announced the acquisition of several assets from its parent company EMC.

The $200M deal includes Server Configuration Manager (formerly Configuresoft), FastScale, Application Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers), and Service Manager (formerly Infra), all parts of the EMC Ionix infrastructure management portfolio.

• Configuresoft, acquired in June 2009, was a configuration management company founded in 1999 (with the name of Fundamental Software) and originally focused on the physical layer. The firm shifted its attention to the virtual infrastructures and VMware only in early 2008.
• FastScale, acquired in August 2009, was a startup launched in 2007 and specialized in optimizing operating systems, deploying them on bare-metal hardware or virtual infrastructures, and managing them as a single application fabric.
  The firm originally promoted its capability to work with VMware infrastructures and then progressively exposed its support for the physical layer.
• nLayers, acquired in June 2006, was a startup founded in 2003 and focused on network discovery and performance troubleshooting.
  It primarily supported physical infrastructures and it’s easy to see similarities with VMware AppSpeed (which used to support physical hardware too – acquired from B-hive in May 2008).
• Infra, acquired in March 2008, was founded in 1991 and focused on Service Desk management (including Incident Management and Problem Management), Change Management, Release Management, Configuration Management (including Federated CMDB), Availability Management and Service Level Management.

Exactly one year ago, virtualization.info suggested that VMware was slowly morphing into an infrastructure management company and that it would soon compete against BMC, CA, HP and IBM for the control of physical layer.

At that time, HP, which would be severely impacted by a direct competition with the virtualization vendor, somehow suggested that VMware is missing a universal configuration management database (UCMDB) to aspire to become an infrastructure management behemoth.
There we go: VMware now has the Infra one, courtesy of EMC.

Another interesting aspect of this deal is the fact that EMC is retaining control on the Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) that is being used to glue together the hypervisor, the network and the storage layers inside Vblocks, the VMware-Cisco-EMC approach to fabric computing.
VMware and EMC may have decided to exclude UIM from the deal to not further compromise the relationship with HP, but for how long this critical component will stay in EMC’s hands?

With the acquisition of Zimbra, back in January, VMware already started to advertise itself in a new way:

This acquisition will further VMware’s mission of taking complexity out of the datacenter, desktop, application development and core IT services, and delivering a fundamentally more efficient and new approach to IT.

The acquisition of the EMC assets provides the final confirmation that VMware is getting ready to control the physical layer. And just in case it’s not clear enough, the company’s CEO Paul Maritz is explicit in the press announcement (our emphasis):

“Customers are increasingly leveraging virtualization as the foundation for modern IT architectures and their path to Cloud Computing,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer, VMware.  “Essential to this evolution is the ability to provide visibility and compliance from virtualized applications down to the underlying physical infrastructure.  The acquisition of these Ionix products and expertise promises to further establish VMware vCenter as the next generation management platform for private cloud infrastructures.”

…

The acquired EMC products and expertise will complement existing VMware development efforts and expand the VMware vCenter product family with capabilities to meet stringent compliance standards in a dynamic virtualized environment.  This new capability will provide a holistic view of configuration compliance of complete IT services from underlying physical assets to applications…

Additional reference to the physical layer can be found in this post from Ben Verghese, Chief Management Architect, Virtualization and Cloud Platforms Business Unit:

We recently announced the ConfigControl product that works closely with vCenter to provide configuration management and compliance to policies in highly dynamic virtualized environments. Ionix Server Configuration Manager enhances this functionality in two important ways. First, it adds visibility of the guest OS and application configuration on virtualized and non-virtualized servers. Second, it provides built-in capability for Compliance Reports ranging from the ESX hardening guide to HIPAA and PCI. The Ionix Application Discovery Manager product (formerly nLayers) automatically discovers complex applications with components on multiple servers, virtual and physical. The combination of these three products, when integration is complete, will give us comprehensive configuration and compliance capability across a broad domain with virtual infrastructure at the core, but extending to the adjacent areas of the OS, complex applications, and physical hardware if needed.

So basically it’s time to forget “VMware, the virtualization (and, by the way, cloud computing) company”.
In a very short time (probably no later than H1 2011) it will be “VMware, the infrastructure management company, from the bare-metal to the applications, off and on-premises”.

This will have immediate consequences on the relationship with HP, IBM and Dell. But more than that, it will greatly extend the competition between VMware and Microsoft.
It’s no more just about the hypervisor and the management capabilities that Virtual Machine Manager offers. This is going to threaten the whole System Center family and the market share that Microsoft has inside the datacenter.

Labels: Acquisitions, EMC, Platform Management, VMware

Last week VMware announced the acquisition of RTO Software, one of the few companies in the presentation virtualization market that are focused on the so called persona management.

RTO Software was founded in 2000, today it counts 12 employees, and offers four products: Virtual Profiles, PinPoint, Discover and TScale.

Both VMware and Symantec OEM’ed the RTO Software flagship product, Virtual Profiles, in VMware View and Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV) and since 2009. Then, at the beginning of February the Symantec version (Workspace Profiles) suddenly disappeared.

Now VMware confirms the acquisition of most RTO Software assets, which will become part of the company Desktop Business Unit, for an undisclosed amount.

The recently appointed VMware CTO for Desktop Virtualization, Scott Davis, summarizes what Virtual Profiles does:

…the technology seamlessly virtualizes, caches and synchronizes a desktop user's roaming profile, while improving both the performance and data integrity of the profile. When a user logs on, instead of monolithically delivering the entire user profile and making the user wait for all of it, Virtual Profiles performs a "just-in-time" delivery. Windows thinks the entire profile is present, however the contents of each segment or file is brought down and subsequently cached when accessed.  When files are updated and closed, Virtual Profiles automatically synchronizes the files  with the profile server, maintaining data integrity across user sessions in real-time and speeding up logoffs.  This  preserves user configuration integrity independently of the desktop image; and also propagates those changes to any other concurrent user sessions that may exist, maintaining data integrity across sessions as well. Registry updates are handled in a similar manner; but at finer granularity. Profile registry changes are automatically synchronized with the stored profile on the server. Since only what has been written to the registry locally is copied back, hive corruption is prevented…

The only RTO Software asset that VMware didn’t acquire is the TScale product, an application memory optimization technology for presentation virtualization.
Apparently, the reason why this one was not included in the deal is that Citrix is OEM’ing it inside Presentation Server with the name of Memory Optimization Management.
According to Brian Madden, who offered an extended insight about the acquisition, Citrix and RTO Software have a multi-year agreement (which seems harder to trash than the Symantec one), and so VMware didn’t touch the fourth component of the portfolio.
Madden also reports that RTO Software will continue to exist, selling TScale and working to release a TScale for Hyper-V.

Customers that are using the first three products and have their support contract expired will only have the chance to buy View. VMware doesn’t plan in fact to sell Virtual Profiles, PinPoint or Discover as stand-alone products.

This is the acquisition #15 for VMware (virtualization.info tracked the previous ones in this article).
Symantec may want to re-include persona management in its portfolio, looking for an alternative partner to deal with (AppSense is a well-known candidate for this. It doesn’t surprise their post about the acquisition).

Labels: Acquisitions, RTO Software, VMware

Maybe the Dell strategy for fabric computing isn’t clear yet, but its approach to virtualization definitively is: so far the company closed a number of OEM agreements with vendors in different areas to build a rich product portfolio without having to own one, and directly compete against VMware or other major players.

The list includes Reflex Systems (March 2009), Quest/Vizioncore and Novell/Platespin (both September 2008),

Dell may no interest in playing a major role in the hardware virtualization space, but it may have some in other, emerging markets.
The company in fact just announced the acquisition of KACE, the US firm focused on system management that launched an application virtualization platform in 2009.

KACE acquired it in September 2008 from a startup called Computers in Motion, and relaunched it in March 2009 as Virtual Kontainers.

The KACE go-to-market strategy seemed pretty similar to the Altiris one (which was acquired by Symantec in April 2008): the application virtualization layer isn’t there to solve the desktop virtualization challenges by offering an alternative to virtual machines; it must be considered an add-on to enrich the enterprise management system, since the virtualized applications can be easily deployed, updated and removed from a single point of control compared to “traditional” software.

So far Virtual Kontainers didn’t have much traction (the entire application virtualization market isn’t), even if KACE introduced an interesting way to solve the ISVs support challenge in version 2.0.  
The Dell interest, at least looking at the press announcement, seems solely focused on the KACE system management technology and its KBOX physical appliances, but the OEM would certainly have the resources to push application virtualization towards a broader adoption.

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

Labels: Acquisitions, Dell, KACE

As soon as it received the green light to complete the Sun acquisition, Oracle moved on and acquired AmberPoint.

AmberPoint is a US company that offers application management and application performance measurement solutions.
It provides a real-time view into performance and runtime behavior of distributed applications, and raises alerts when SLA limits are approaching or when transactions fail to complete, or when certain business parameters are violated.

While this has no direct connection to virtualization, there’s at least another product in the virtualization industry that offers (or may offer in the future) similar capabilities: VMware AppSpeed, which was launched in July 2009 after the May 2008 acquisition of B-hive.

VMware and Oracle are both embracing the fabric computing approach.
VMware is working to control all tiers from the hypervisor up to the application level (see the acquisition of SpringSource and Zimbra), leaving everything below to its partners (and investors) EMC and Cisco.
Oracle already is in control of all tiers after the Sun acquisition, but it still has to provide a seamless integration.
In both cases, there’s a real need for smart engines that automatically manipulate the fabric building blocks to guarantee the SLAs for all those mission-critical applications that customers may want to deploy. Those engines have to rely on some sort of intelligence to understand what application (or virtual machine) has a performance degradation and why. That’s here that products like AmberPoint and AppSpeed become handy.

Again: if Oracle will be able to integrate all the technologies it now owns in the proper way, it may come out of the blue with a remarkable cloud computing platform that actualizes exactly the VMware vision. Yes, even if Larry Ellison hates the term cloud computing.

Labels: Acquisitions, AmberPoint, Oracle, Performance Monitoring

In September 2009 VMware announced an OEM agreement with RTO Software to offer its Virtual Profiles product as part of View.
Virtual Profiles is a mandatory piece to manage the so-called persona (the user data and customization of the applications and the system environment) in a virtual desktop infrastructure.

The most interesting part of this deal is that RTO Software has the same agreement with Symantec, which competes in the VDI space with VMware.

Now Brian Madden is reporting that Symantec has suddenly stopped selling Virtual Profiles (called Workspace Profiles in their portfolio) and that every reference to the product disappeared from the corporate website.

Madden suggests that this is a sign that VMware acquired RTO Software. The standard answer he received from the company PR department is that the company doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation.
Of course not.

Labels: Acquisitions, RTO Software, Symantec, VMware

Last week a report from The 451 Group ignited speculations about which company VMware may acquire next.
The list includes Terracotta, GenStone Systmes, MuleSoft, SOPERA, Heroku, Engine Yard, Skyway Software, Chordian Software.
The analysis firm even suggests that VMware may try to get MySQL from the just closed Oracle and Sun merger.
Worldwide press is quoting this shopping list with titles like  “More Acquisitions Ahead for VMware?”.

Of course VMware will acquire additional companies. And speculations aside, the company’s CEO already expressed an evident interest for middleware.

So, while everybody is busy with future steps, virtualization.info would like to take a different approach and recap the previous acquisitions, trying to figure out what VMware did with the technologies bought so far.

At today we can count 14 known acquisitions. In the table below we report (oldest first) the company names, the acquisition date, the VMware products that today use the acquired technologies, and additional notes that are relevant:

Labels: Acquisitions, VMware

virtualization.info tracks and reports about the US startup FastScale since its launch in 2007.
The company has always been under most radars despite its interesting technology to reduce the size of virtual appliances and manage large scale VMware infrastructures like application fabrics.

When it emerged from stealth mode in April 2007, its products, Composer Suite and Virtual Manager, were already deployed inside VMware organization.

At the end of August 2009, while the attention was fully focused on the VMware VMworld conference, EMC announced the acquisition of FastScale for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition is extremely important because the startup technologies are being integrate in the EMC management portfolio, the one from where the VCE VBlock Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) came from.

The future releases of the Vblock computing stack will further materialize the vision of a private cloud, where the hardware is abstracted by virtualization layer (VMware vSphere), the operating system is abstracted by the application framework (VMware SpringSource) and the management layer (EMC Ionix), and everything is just a scalable application fabric.

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

Labels: Acquisitions, EMC, FastScale

Next week is going to be one of the most important ones in 2010, at least in terms of announcements.

The consumer side of the IT world in fact is going to enjoy the Apple presentation that will take place on Jan. 27, where Steve Jobs is expected to launch the iTablet/iPad or whatever he decided to call it.
The business side of the same IT world instead is probably expecting a significant announcement from VMware, Cisco and NetApp, in the joint presentation that will take place on Jan. 26, despite the absence of Cisco CEO John Chambers (who probably doesn’t want to replicate the show to launch the VMware-Cisco-EMC alliance).

But next week there’s another, even more important, presentation that corporations may want to attend: the Oracle announcement about its strategy with the Sun assets.

Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun in April 2009. The US Department of Justice approved it just four months later. The European Union, instead, took until today to approve the $7.4 billion deal without conditions.

Oracle didn’t waste a second and announced a live webcast scheduled for Jan. 27 to discuss its integration plans and product roadmaps.
Larry Ellison must be looking for some sort of head to head competition with Steve Jobs since the Oracle presentation will start just one hour before the Apple one (9am PST) and will finish much later (2pm PST).

The invitation doesn’t specifically mention virtualization, but it involves other critical aspects of the Oracle strategy that may impact the virtualization landscape:

Find out how Oracle + Sun goes beyond your expectations to:

• Offer a broad range of products including servers, storage, networking, and software
• Integrate all the components–hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications–for unmatched performance, reliability, and security
• Simplify IT management and reduce system deployment and integration costs
• Continue to drive innovation in SPARC, Solaris, the Java platform, and many other technologies

In September 2009 virtualization.info questioned the Oracle credibility as a major virtualization player.
The Oracle prompt answer started with “First, the Sun acquisition has not closed so we unfortunately cannot discuss that yet.” So we expect that Oracle will have much to say next week or immediately after.

Labels: Acquisitions, Oracle, Sun

As expected, today VMware confirmed the acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo.
The company didn’t disclose the terms of the deal but All Things D reports that we are talking about something more than $100M.

This is the acquisition #14 and like no other (not even the SpringSource one) this seems far, far away from the roots of VMware.

As already mentioned in the previous coverage of the deal, Zimbra is an online/offline collaboration suite which Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350M in cash and that competes with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) PIMs offered by Google or Zoho for example.
Zimbra also offers an open source mail client that competes with products such as Microsoft Office and Mozilla Thunderbird.
Yahoo is rumored to be trying to sell it since September 2008.

What VMware is going to do with Zimbra? Something that is completely unrelated to virtualization: it’s going to continue to serve the 55 million mailboxes that customers created today and further develop the suite.
If there’s a more organic vision behind this acquisition, the company definitively failed to clarify it.

The only thing that the VMware press announcement and the corporate blog post say is that Zimbra will be “integrated”  and “optimized” in/for the vCloud offering. But Zimbra already is available as a virtual appliance, as the VMware CTO reminds in his post.
What sort of integration and optimization are they looking for? For sure the first step is turning the Zimbra virtual appliance into a vApp, with the critical metadata to enforce SLAs and security policies. But does that need an acquisition?

What the company communications let understand is that VMware now sees offering core applications like email a key piece of their strategy. And this is part of the real big news.

VMware has a strong credibility in the enterprise market because it owns a formidable virtualization platform, but holds zero pieces at the platform (hence the SpringSource move) and application level.
This basically means that many other acquisitions will follow, because mail is not the only core application that companies need.

Under the Paul Maritz direction, who replaced the founder Diane Greene in July 2008, the new VMware is now evidently trying to build a complete computing stack.
Maritz has been a top executive in Microsoft, working side by side with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, so he may have an idea or two on how to build “MS 2010 Cloud Edition”. His former colleague in Redmond and now COO in VMware, Tod Nielsen, is here to help.
At this point it won’t be too surprising if the company would be interested in an operating system too, which would turn Red Hat into a potential acquisition target (Novell is out of this potential game because of its tight partnership with Microsoft).

The other part of the big news lies in one of the first sentences of the press announcement:

This acquisition will further VMware’s mission of taking complexity out of the datacenter, desktop, application development and core IT services, and delivering a fundamentally more efficient and new approach to IT.

This is a brand new mission for VMware. At the last VMworld the company introduced the idea of “taking complexity out of the data center”, but this a full declaration of independence from virtualization.

With such mission the company can do pretty much anything. It can go up to mission-critical application hosting and down to hardware management. Which is exactly what virtualization.info suggested almost a year ago with the article VMware is becoming an infrastructure management company.

All the above defines a new course for VMware. It may brings the company to the next level, but it certainly introduces some new problems:

1. VMware now has to compete with Microsoft on multiple fronts. And just because it’s a winner at the virtualization level it doesn’t mean that it will be elsewhere.
2. VMware now has to develop, deliver and innovate on many new fronts. They may be too many to make a difference and offer the excellence that customers are used to.

Labels: Acquisitions, VMware, Zimbra

For the ones that don’t know it, Zimbra is an online/offline collaboration suite which Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350M in cash and that competes with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) PIMs offered by Google or Zoho for example.
Zimbra also offers an open source mail client that competes with products such as Microsoft Office and Mozilla Thunderbird.

The platform didn’t get much traction compared to the competitors above and Yahoo is rumored to be trying to sell it since September 2008.

Now All Things Digital, the tech division of the The Wall Street Journal, is reporting that VMware is acquiring Zimbra.

While this is seems extremely unlikely, WSJ is very reliable news source and Kara Swisher reports confirmations from multiple sources.
So, assuming this rumor will be confirmed as true, the question is: why a virtualization vendor like VMware would want a SaaS collaboration suite like Zimbra?

Possibly because, as virtualization.info already suggested, VMware may be working to compete with Google.
The new CEO Paul Maritz, which has been a top executive in Microsoft for many years, may envision a new VMware which offers IaaS, PaaS (see the SpringSource acquisition) and SaaS technologies all together.

Problem is that VMware has a solid reputation as a virtualization company. And a virtualization company which supports any platform and any application, no matter what the vendor is. 
So far VMware has been pretty good at keeping this reputation, despite its parent company EMC.

But the more VMware “expands up the stack”, to use the Swisher’s words, the more partners it turns into competitors.
Additionally, no matter how respected VMware is in the IT world at today: any product it will launch besides hardware virtualization platforms may receive a skeptical welcome and just turn away the core customer base. The reactions obtained after the SpringSource acquisition are an example.

Again, assuming this acquisition is confirmed, it is legit to ask: is the company moving this way because this is the new right way to evolve for VMware, or just because this is the best way the company believes it could survive a future where Microsoft turned virtualization into a real OS commodity and Google persuaded the world to embrace HTML5 and just release web applications?

Update: All Things D further confirms the rumor and informs that Yahoo and VMware will announce the sale tomorrow, Jan. 12, 2010.
It seems that VMware paid more than $100M to have Zimbra.

The acquisition is stranger than ever because the intellectual property of Zimbra technology will remain at Yahoo, which will give it back to VMware over time.

Labels: Acquisitions, VMware, Yahoo, Zimbra

Last Friday Microsoft announced the acquisition of Opalis Software, a run-book automation company founded in 1998 in Canada with 70 employees (according to LinkedIn) and over 300 customers (according to Opalis).

Data center orchestration is one of the most important areas where virtualization will expand in the coming years, as soon as customers will realize that their virtual infrastructures are reaching such a scale and complexity to become inefficient.

VMware and Citrix already invested in this area.
VMware acquired the Swiss startup Dunes Technologies in September 2007, and it’s now offering their solution for free, as part of vSphere 4.0 platform, under the name of Orchestrator.
Citrix offers an orchestration framework called Workflow Studio since January 2009.

Microsoft isn’t shy to say that the Opalis Software technology will be integrated in its System Center portfolio and that it will serve as the automation layer for Hyper-V virtualization and Azure cloud computing.

With this acquisition Microsoft doesn’t need much more to compete end-to-end against VMware on virtualization. Yes, the company still doesn’t have a client hypervisor, and didn’t clarify if it plans to become a major VDI player on its own or not, but the technology to deliver both missing pieces is there.
The Microsoft problem is that its vision about virtualization is nowhere near the VMware’s one. They have a lot of products which could be integrated to form an impressive end-to-end offering, but the today’s reality is completely different. And of course the customers’ trust in the Microsoft capability to compete with VMware reflects this.

Update: In October, The 451 Group analysis firm reported that this acquisition is around $60M.
Opalis raised $25M in venture capital funding and scored over $10M in revenue.

Labels: Acquisitions, Microsoft, Opalis Software, Platform Orchestration

With a surprising move Microsoft today announced the acquisition of Sentillion, the US startup that launched in summer 2006 the virtualization product called vThere.

The company’s press announcement doesn’t mention at all vThere, solely focusing on the startup presence in the healthcare industry and its solution there.

vThere is what we call here at virtualization.info a platform wrapper. It’s a piece of software that integrates with a hosted virtualization platform and wraps its virtual machines in a security layer.
The wrapper enforces corporate policies defined by the administrator like the VM expiration date, the encryption of the virtual hard drive, the capability to join certain networks, etc. 

Sentillion vThere competes with products like VMware ACE, which is now about to be merged with Workstation, MokaFive Suite, and Kidaro Workspaces, which Microsoft acquired in March 2008 and that now sells with the name of MED-V as part of its Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).

At the beginning vThere used to integrate with VMware Player, but at the end of October 2006 Sentillion decided to replace it with Parallels Workstation.
The company doesn’t release any major product update for vThere since the end of 2006. The product is so irrelevant for Sentillion that it now barely has a single page on the corporate website.

It’s not clear if Microsoft will use the vThere technology for MED-V or just drop the product.

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

Labels: Acquisitions, Microsoft, Platform Wrapper, Sentillion

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