In VMware's world, nothing is real. Well, some things are -- VMware's hypervisor,
its VMware server and certainly revenues, competition, customers and partners
are all pretty real. But VMware's business is all about making real things virtual,
and now the company is bringing its virtual revolution to a new territory.
This week, the EMC subsidiary introduced a hypervisor for mobile devices that
is the result of its recent acquisition of French developer Trango Virtual Processors.
Trango's app is now VMware's Mobile
Virtualization Platform, and the company is targeting mobile phone makers
with its new offering.
The move is interesting for a lot of reasons, but we're intrigued by it mainly
because, as far as we can tell, Citrix and Microsoft haven't moved into the
mobile space yet. Either VMware sees some real opportunity there and is trying
to grab the market before everybody else does, or the company is covering a
few extra bases in an attempt to guarantee a revenue stream in case Microsoft
(for example) starts eating away at precious market share in the enterprise
-- or maybe a little of both.
In either case, it's another frontier for virtualization, a technology that
seems to have almost unlimited potential. The functionality involved might be
virtual, but the market and revenue potential could be very real. The only questions
at this point involve how long it will take for mobile technology to go virtual,
and how quickly VMware's competitors will follow it into this space. At this
point, it looks at though VMware's reputation as virtualization pioneer is solidly
intact.
Is there any limit to what virtualization can do? What are some creative uses
for it you've thought of or implemented? Share your thoughts at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on November 12, 20080 comments
Sometimes there's just a lot of news that doesn't require a separate entry
for each announcement but nevertheless merits mention in RCPU. That's why you're
now smelling the warm, inviting aroma of...a product-news potpourri!
Dell, Seagate and McAfee have a new effort for full-disk
encryption.
Sun announced "open
storage" appliances this week.
EMC has an intriguing offering of storage
for the cloud.
AppSense has released a new version of a product that managed
virtual environments.
And somebody called NetQoS -- how on earth do we pronounce that? -- released
something having to do with voice and video monitoring. (Warning: the ubiquitous
and mostly meaningless phrase "unified communications" is prominently
involved.)
Posted by Lee Pender on November 12, 20080 comments
The House that Ruth Built is just about gone, to be replaced by the house that...Steinbrenner?
Jeter? surely not Torre...built. Anyway, Cisco is going to be
doing
some cool stuff in the new Yankee Stadium. Of course, RCPU's official position
on this is the same as its official position on all things New York Yankees:
BOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! (By the way, if you're a non-Yankees baseball fan, we'll warn
you that the lead paragraph of the story linked might cause you to vomit all
over your keyboard.)
Posted by Lee Pender on November 12, 20080 comments
Well, failures of
driver
installations, to be specific...and printers in particular did not fare
well.
By the way, many thanks to those of you who have written to share your opinions
of Vista SP1 for Redmond magazine's reader review. We're a little late
following up with you (sorry about that), but someone from the magazine will
be in contact this week.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 11, 20080 comments
First things first before we travel halfway around the globe: We'd like to
wish a very happy Veterans Day to all and offer our sincere gratitude to all
those who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces. Thank you for your service.
Now, let's travel to perhaps the most cliché-ridden place on earth:
Australia!
Does anybody else remember the "Simpsons" episode in which Bart goes
to Australia? (We can't find it on YouTube...sorry.) There's a funny montage
in it about Americans' brief
fascination with Australia in
the 1980s and all the hackneyed clichés and stereotypical
characters it gave birth to.
We're required by international treaty -- look it up -- to mention Crocodile
Dundee at least once (check, plus we linked a photo) and use at least one stereotypical
Australian phrase (let's go with, "G'day, mate!") when talking about
Australia. So, with that out of the way, we can get on to the point of this
entry. (And, by the way, Aussie friends -- we're not making fun of you; we're
actually making fun of American popular culture from 20-plus years ago. And,
as a native Texan who spent five years living in Europe, your editor is well-accustomed
to having to dispel -- or sometimes reinforce -- stereotypes and answer some
odd questions about his homeland.)
Anyway, the reason we're Down Under (almost forgot to work that one in) is
that there's a pretty interesting channel story coming out of Australia. Microsoft
recently announced
a deal with longtime Australian partner Telstra to provide hosted e-mail
applications on Telstra's SaaS platform. Nothing earth-shattering, right? Well,
no, it's not.
But it's got some Aussie partners up in arms. They're worried that the deal
will kill
off opportunities for other resellers in the channel, and we kind of see
where they're coming from. Check out a quote -- actually attributed to somebody
who wasn't afraid to go on the record -- from a reseller in the story linked
above:
"Why would you employ an IT technician to fix your computer problems
if it's all online to Telstra or Microsoft," Total Network Support director
Oliver Lindsaar said. "It will have a very big impact on lower-end employment
in the industry. Microsoft and Telstra say there are all these other opportunities.
Yes there are, but you either have to be very innovative with your products
or very large to be able to supply the sorts of service large companies want."
It's the last part of that quote that's the kicker -- specifically the part
about being "very innovative." Partners, and not just partners in
Australia, are worried
about Microsoft's SaaS plans, which seem to include the channel (and hosting
partners in particular) almost as
an afterthought. And now some Aussie service providers are apparently worried
that Microsoft has chosen to go forth with one particular partner in their market,
further limiting their opportunities in a model that might not have seemed that
potentially lucrative to begin with.
And they should worry. Then they should work on that "very innovative"
bit that the partner above mentioned. Because the reality of SaaS and Microsoft's
SaaS plans is that channel companies are going to have to rethink and rework
their business models if they want to be a part of this new computing paradigm.
If SaaS is going to take hold, it's going to have to cause a massive shift in
the way companies handle IT investments -- that's really the point of it. And
old, familiar business models rarely hold up when massive market shifts take
place.
We're not here to comment on whether Microsoft's Telstra deal is fair or not
-- because that's not the point. The point is that it's done and that the reality
of SaaS is slapping some partners in the face. They need to determine now how
they're going to deal with it. Fortunately, they have some time -- SaaS might
never live up to its much-ballyhooed potential (something to consider), and
it certainly won't completely replace more traditional models any time soon.
But it's also something the channel as a whole can't ignore any longer.
What are your plans for SaaS? What's your take on deals like the one Microsoft
made with Telstra? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on November 11, 20080 comments
From the Somebody Must Care About This file comes a story about the
uncertain
status of Windows Mobile 7.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 11, 20080 comments
Well,
one
says, anyway...a blogger who takes a pretty long look at the successor to
the forlorn Windows Vista.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 06, 20080 comments
It's a tough time to be...well, anything in business right now, it seems. But
it's a really tough time to be a startup business, what with credit markets
still tight and so forth. But there's some hope for those companies trying to
get a technology infrastructure up and running, and it's coming from Microsoft.
BizSpark
is a program through which Microsoft is providing lots of technology and services
with no up-front costs to companies that are fewer than three years old and
earn less than $1 million per year in revenue. It's a shot over the bow of open
source for Redmond, which has at times in the past had trouble convincing small
companies that the total cost of ownership for Microsoft technology is less
than that of open source.
Well, nothing's cheaper than free, and free is the initial price tag that BizSpark
carries. Of course, the idea is to get small and emerging firms hooked on Microsoft
by offering something free up-front -- not exactly a novel concept, but historically
a pretty effective one in lots of different markets. The timing of it seems
pretty good, too, and BizSpark will also include reasonable
credit terms for when money does inevitably change hands.
Windows Azure is, or can be, prominently involved in the plan, and hosting
partners will also have a role as providers of low-cost hosting to BizSpark
customers. And if BizSpark does start a fire that burns open source, the entire
Microsoft partner community could end up benefiting from the introduction of
a new generation of small companies into the Microsoft fold. That could end
up providing a little relief for everybody.
Are you participating in BizSpark? If so, how? Tell us at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on November 06, 20080 comments
Don't press any panic buttons or anything, but some of the projections coming
out of mega-vendor Cisco
don't
sound too positive -- even if they also shouldn't be too surprising.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 06, 20080 comments
So if Vista's got much better security than XP, what's posing a threat to the
pariah operating system? Uh,
Microsoft's
own ActiveX, actually. And who's making that claim? Er...Microsoft. Yeah.
That's a little awkward.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 05, 20080 comments
It's called
Services
Connector, which sounds like part of a highway off-ramp or something.
Posted by Lee Pender on November 05, 20080 comments