Microsoft gears up for victory in the virtual battle
Published: 09 Oct 2008 01:00 BST
You have to hand it to Microsoft — it knows how to make its mark on a market. The company understands that you don't have to be first in to win, and so it will be with virtualisation, according to one of the main Microsoft managers responsible for that technology, Zane Adam.
Adam, who is senior director for virtualisation product management, believes Microsoft has the right strategy to grab a much larger share of virtualisation sales, given that the company has, in his words, "probably the widest portfolio of virtualisation products in the market today".
Adam believes that, together with Microsoft server software's ability to work with both virtual and physical machines, and the right price point, this puts the company in a good position to become the leader in the market.
Indeed, the right price point, as far as the company's hypervisor Hyper-V is concerned, is no charge at all. But the virtualisation market continues to become more competitive: in September, Red Hat announced it would make its hypervisor free as well.
The competition also lies with VMware, the current market leader, and with Citrix, the owner of another popular hypervisor that it acquired when it bought XenSource last year.
There are many different strands to the virtualisation market. Last week, Adam explained to ZDNet.co.uk Microsoft's strategy to bring them all together.
Q: Microsoft has announced a lot of virtualisation products and initiatives over the past year. Isn't that creating some confusion?
A: On client virtualisation, there are two big things: VDI [Virtual Desktop Infrastructure], our centralised desktop offering; and application virtualisation, that we had for two years, [before] we re-named the product App-V. On the server side, we have all the emphasis on Hyper-V, and all the management investment, for physical and virtual management, through System Centre.
We have probably the widest portfolio of virtualisation products in the market today.
How do you see the virtualisation market panning out? By which I mean, how does Microsoft get ahead in virtualisation?
The core to being a major player and staying a major player requires [several] things.
Breadth of offering — so not just one virtualisation, but server, client and application [virtualisation].
Next, in addition to breadth, the reach of the offering. Is the infrastructure around the client large enough? Now ours is pretty large, plus [we have] the name and the brand.
Then the third thing, how do you differentiate between the companies? The differentiator from a technology perspective is that we can manage both the virtual and the physical infrastructures through a single pane of glass.
No large company out there is 100 per cent virtualised. At Gartner and IDC, they will say that perhaps 12 percent of the servers out there are virtualised. The vast majority are not. The big question for managers has been: "How do I manage both the physical and virtual through a single pane of glass?".
We think that differentiator is in our System Centre management product. That differentiates us from VMware, which is perhaps the largest [company] in the market today.
The next thing is democratising the technology. The management stack that we sell, we sell at one-third the price of our competitors. We give them a more feature-rich feature set to manage, both physical and virtual. And then we got rid of complexity.
Our goal is to have mass adoption. So our goal is always to make the product affordable. By removing...
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