Phoenix Technologies doesn’t seem much scared by the recently announced partnership Citrix and Intel to develop a client hypervisor.
In fact, despite both Citrix’s Project Independence and Phoenix Technologies’ HyperCore are client hypervisors based on Xen, the former seems to be part of a complete VDI platform built to satisfy the highest end of the enterprise market, while the latter seems rather targeting the consumer market and the SMBs.
To further demonstrate that its just released HyperCore is not threatened by Project Independence, Phoenix announces a major partnership with ASUS, which will include the hypervisor in its future notebooks.
ASUS certainly has a lot of interest to slip this product into its EEE PCs: Phoenix developed HyperCore hoping that it would serve virtual machines running just a single program (like an Internet browser or a video player) in place of Windows.
And this is exactly what the ASUS customers need to save the short battery life of their netbooks.
It’s clear that Phoenix is trying to partner with every notebook vendor on the market. Besides ASUS, the company already closed a similar deal with NEC in July 2008.