Is this this end of the ride for VMware?
Image by cuellar via Flickr
Well VMworld 2008 kicks off in a few hours time and for the first time, I am not there. So whilst it would have been good to be in Las Vegas to see what the world of virtualisation has got to say for itself, I can’t help but think that all eyes are not on Vegas this week.
The news of various key long term staff members leaving the company over the last few weeks plus some major announcements from the likes of Sun and Citrix seems to be casting a shadow over the event plus of course Microsoft are now ready with their Hyper-V product.
So is this the end of the ride?
Well life is going to get tough. That’s a given. After all, VMware have been THE leaders in this technology for a number of years now and have made a LOT of money out of the market place but most of this has been built on the idea of a Hypervisor that you license and sell.
But this is just the problem. Sun and Microsoft are both quite happy to give their hypervisor away for free. So regardless of how good the VMware product is and regardless of what features it is has over the competition, it’s very hard to compete with free.
And whilst the argument is that the new money in this market is going to be made out of the tools and management solutions, the VMware toolset has always been weak. Sun and Microsoft know this and when you look at their new products you can see where they have spent their development dollars. MANAGEMENT!
So is this the end of the ride?
Not yet but I think we are going to see huge gains by the new kids on the block and especially from Microsoft. A lot of large corporates run 100% Microsoft these days so it stands to reason that their virtualisation platform of choice will be the Microsoft one.
What I do know however is that right now, I will not be looking to buy any VMware shares.
