2007: Industry Leaders' Retrospective By VSM News Staff published: Tuesday, January 08 2008
This past year was a important year for the virtualization industry. For the first time Virtualization became a household name with the VMware IPO and the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix. It was easy to see that virtualization had infiltrated the production environment and was here to stay as companies were now more concerned with the management issues around virtualization rather than the technology itself.
VSM asked some of the notable players within the virtualization industry this question:
In your opinion, what was the most remarkable event, announcement or product of 2007...and why?
Here’s what they had to say.
“History will show that the most significant event in 2007 was the industry harnessing virtualization to lead the Green transformation of IT in order to reduce cost, resolve operational issues and reduce environmental impact. In 2007, virtualization was the cornerstone behind industry milestones such as IBM’s Project Big Green, a $1 billion annual investment to transform global IT infrastructures into "green" data centers, and the world’s first corporate-led Energy Efficiency Certificate program to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions.
Green has made virtualization relevant to a much broader audience beyond traditional IT. As a key speaker at recent Green events “Hollywood Goes Green” and the November UN conference on ICT on climate change, it’s exciting to see virtualization beginning to cross industries on a global scale, having the potential not only to transform the IT landscape – but indeed, to touch government, culture and the way consumers live their lives in the future.”
~ Rich Lechner, Vice President, IT Optimization, IBM
“The most remarkable event of 2007 has been the acceptance of virtualization as a mainstream business solution, including the release of the first commercial virtual appliances, the increasing sophistication of virtualization management tools and the rapid adoption of cross-platform virtualization for transporting legacy workloads to standards-based hardware platforms.”
~ Ian Robinson, VP of Marketing, Transitive Corporation
"The announcement of Google Android, the first fully vertically integrated open-source mobile phone development platform, is the most important news of the year. While Android is described as a software development kit (SDK), it really is a virtualized software development (VSD) platform that will enable full-system development of complex mobile phone applications independent of the availability of any kind of hardware for the target. All that's needed is a desktop host. With this VSD approach, developers access virtual functional hardware (processor, IO, GUI), which frees them from hardware dependencies to focus on their software applications first and then look after the underlining hardware. It is a departure from the traditional bottom-up, serial development process where OEMs focus on hardware first. In effect, Android makes hardware irrelevant at the application level. Android has the potential to bring VSD into the mainstream as the development infrastructure of choice.”
~ Michel Genard, vice president of marketing, Virtutech
"I think the emergence of x86 virtualization solutions from companies like Citrix, Oracle, and Sun will have a very positive impact on the space. These are all vendors with a significant track record of operating deep in critical production environments, and I think this will help accelerate the maturation of x86 virtualization into a truly hardened data center class solution."
~ Andrew Hillier, CTO and Co-founder, CiRBA
"We've seen a dramatic shift in the way virtualization is represented in the marketplace this past year. In 2006, virtualization was closely tied to server consolidation, whereas in 2007, customers began to expect more from their virtualization solutions. IT professionals are starting to value the speed and agility that virtualization brings to their next generation, dynamic datacenter more than just simple consolidation ratios."
~ Steve Wilson, VP, xVM, Sun
"For me, 2007 was the year when Desktop Virtualization became a major mainstream topic and appeared prominently on the CIO's radar. As virtualized desktops become the de-facto enterprise client over the next few years, I think we'll look back and track many of the key developments that enabled this architectural shift, back to 2007. So, given the seminal nature of this year, it's quite hard to focus on just one event!
"Nonetheless, asked to choose I would say that VMworld 2007 was the most significant event held in the Information Technology industry this year. This show did a lot to expose CIOs and Analysts to an emerging breed of critical infrastructure components that are the engine powering the desktop virtualization revolution. In particular, it was at VMworld 2007 that ClearCube's Sentral 5.5 product won the "Best Desktop Virtualization" software award. The broad set of capabilities this product delivers will allow VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) to be deployed and managed effectively. In many ways, it is a key infrastructure enabler that will act as a catalyst for virtualization adoption in 2008 and beyond. By integrating all the key pieces required for VDI, including Virtual Machine management capabilities and a superb Connection Broker, Sentral cuts through the complexity of having to orchestrate a dozen piece-part solutions from multiple vendors to get to a working VDI deployment."
~ Amir Husain, CTO, ClearCube Technology
“The most remarkable news-worthy item of 2007 was a virtualization trend that never made a single headline. The driver for virtualization has long been consolidation and cost savings. In 2007, through the pressures of SOA and a more sophisticated user experience on the web, businesses started introducing virtualization into production environments in order to provide a more agile infrastructure. Virtualization advanced from the back-office IT to driving a more responsive, resilient infrastructure that powers leading edge innovations. With this, virtualization has become a critical ingredient that ADDS to infrastructure complexity and cost. These high-powered web infrastructure environments usually have little problem with utilizing their capacity, and virtualization no matter how lightweight adds to the complexity and capacity requirements. This change throws all the rules and tools of virtualization management out the window. These companies using virtualization in this way have new demands for security, provisioning, disaster recovery, and monitoring. No one is talking about this yet, but I predict in 2008, they will. I know, because our product Hyperic HQ solves some of the monitoring needs for this demographic, and the trend is definitely growing critical mass and products are starting to catch up.”
~ Javier Soltero, CEO and co-founder, Hyperic, Inc.
"With the VMWare IPO and $500M acquisition of XenSource by Citrix, virtualization exploded from the realm of emerging technology and onto the radar of just about everybody in the technology industry. It made the value in the space clear and really got the money people thinking about how else to capitalize on this new technology. This will spur a whole new round of innovation and investment that will yield ever greater advancements and create the most dramatic remaking of IT infrastructures since the introduction of the personal computer."
~ Kimbro Staken, Co-Founder and CEO, JumpBox
“The VMware IPO and how it is bringing the concept of virtualization to the masses. Recently, a young man working at a consumer electronics store said to me in passing that he had a hot stock tip. He said a company involved with virtualization called VMware is going to be big. Wow I thought – I’m involved with an industry that is now becoming a common household term. This demonstrated to me how the VMware IPO has brought the concept of server virtualization to the masses – not just by virtue of what the technology offers, but also by the hype around VMware and that it could be the next “Google” stock to own. Even now the mass market does not fully understand what VMware does and anytime someone mentions virtualization in any capacity (workstation, storage, or the like), the stock goes up or down. It’s interesting to see that this stock and the technology behind it have generated such worldwide attention, even to the point where a teenager working at a register is planning to invest a few hundred dollars in it. For many, the VMware IPO was truly the most remarkable event of 2007.”
~ David Bieneman, CEO, Vizioncore
“The acquisition of XenSource by Citrix marked a key positive inflection point for the virtualization industry. The scope and scale of the consolidation indicates the seriousness of the vendor, partner, and customer commitment to virtualization technology. When combined with the ongoing focus on data center consolidation and movement away from isolated and underutilized server infrastructure, this commitment paves the way for expanded virtualization in 2008 to include networking, devices and even complete software stacks, including operating systems, applications and configurations. The outcome is a flexible and optimized environment where a complete application stack can be deployed quickly anywhere, anytime to any available resource – automatically, on-demand.”
~ Lynn LeBlanc, CEO, FastScale Technology
“One could say that the most remarkable thing was the XenSource acquisition by Citrix. It gave customers a strong alternative to VMware, showed the market the true value of companies that deliver solid virtualization solutions, and has helped position Citrix as a main contender in 2008.”
~ Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems
"2007 was a dynamic year for the server consolidation market. The industry saw new products enter the industry, a spectacular IPO, and the first round of consolidation take place. The most remarkable thing of 2007 is in fact not a product, announcement or event. It was the market change that precipitated all of these things. Virtualization is not a new technology and the product itself did not change so much as how the market perceived it. In 2007, server virtualization has successfully moved past the simple level of achieving great ROI and immediate utility into business continuity. In doing so, the technology moved from being an “operational tool” to a fledgling datacenter architecture, leading the way to a truly virtualized data center. To move from a “tool” to a real architecture meant that virtualization needed to add new control, management and automation capabilities. This was spearheaded by firms like Embotics, and recognized by VMware, who started expanding its management capabilities with the acquisition of Dunes. Other major players also responded to this market shift with Citrix acquiring XenSource and Microsoft bringing out their Hyper-V beta early. 2007 was not about new product announcements or acquisitions, it was about a market growing up.”
~ David Lynch, VP of Marketing, Embotics Corporation
|
