Microsoft has a reputation for being a developer's best friend as the Microsoft platforms are successful in larger part due to the support of their eco-system. There are many examples - SharePoint with several hundred partners and Microsoft's relationship with Citrix. VMware on the other hand doesn't have the same magic touch developing its ecosystem, in large part due to its product line expansion strategy. Probably the best way to think about being a VMware partner is that VMware will develop 80% of the functionality itself and take down 80% of the market opportunities unfortunately leaving partners with a much smaller and technically challenging market slice. At VMWorld there were new examples of this as VMware introduced vShield and in doing so changed the bar for companies trying to add security functionality to the VMware platform - setting the stage for VMware to roll up the bulk of opportunities in this space. And two announced acquisitions, single sign on vendor TriCipher and its $100M acquisition of Integrien for visibility must have taken the wind out of the sails of a dozen companies providing the similar capabilities. VMware is on top of its game so if its ecosystem rules are 80/20 then that's the way the games going to be played this time around.
At the end of August Citrix announced its plans to acquire VMLogix, a company focused on virtual datacenter service such as self-service. In July, Quest announced its plans to acquire Surgient which was largely in the same space. And of course way back in 2006 VMware acquired Akimbi which some people say formed the roots of project Redwood which launched at VMWorld as vCloud Director. While a year ago these products were focused on providing services to the test/dev world, today the focus has changed and they're viewed as the initial service platforms for service providers bringing virtual datacenter functionality on line. Interesting how this category changed so quickly.
Michael Dell was the keynote speaker on the second day of the Citrix Synergy conference. You might wonder why he even chose this venue to talk considering that much of the work that Citrix is doing in desktop virtualization eventually ends up reducing PC differentiation — for instance, with a "bare metal" hypervisor it's hard to tell the difference between a Dell laptop or a Lenovo since it's all virtualized. Although he wasn't asked that question directly, he had a pretty good response to the subject along the lines of "When something comes along that customers want you stand in the way of it at your own peril." He made the observation that eventually the complete product offerings for the coming generation of virtual endpoints will have an all encompassing solutions including servers, storage and services. Having bought two out of three of those pieces recently — storage focused EqualLogic in Nov, 2007 and services focused Perot Systems in Sept, 2009 — he clearly understands the importance of building an alternative strategy as virtualization reduces his core differentiation. It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out.
A lot of early discussion on Cloud computing didn't make much sense in the cruel light of day: Cloud computing is unlikely to be cheaper than doing utility computing in your own data center; Cloud Bursting has to take into consideration the laws of physics and reality of moving large volumes of data. On the other hand, the underlying forces couldn't be more important: the enablement of utility (on demand) computing models; the ability to evolve service-oriented IT; the enablement of software/platform and infrastructure as a service. In our after-dinner discussion we'll attack these interesting issues and try and illuminate the key points (or at least have entertaining fun in the process!). Peter Christy will lead the discussion as always. He'll be joined by Citrix product executive Sunil Potti who is right in the middle of their Cloud efforts, and Scott Johnson, Venture Partner at Alloy Ventures (our generous sponsor for the dinner).