It’s been announced that EMC is to sell 10% of their wholey owned subsidiary, VMware. Apparently, this announcement has been "welcomed" by EMC shareholders due to disappointment. There is concern that there is a move by competitors, i.e. Xen and Microsoft, into free virtualisation solutions which has force Vmware to respond and will hit revenue. VMware will have to focus sales ont heir flagship ESX product and virtualisation management solutions.
Wow!
We’ve seen a boom in the acceptance and deployment of virtualisation in the last year. On the desktop end, Microsoft woul have the advantage with their free Virtual PC. At the mid level, it”s fairly even but VMware’s "Server" product has the slightest of edges (due to state saving vs disk ifferencing, IMO). Certainly, everyone I talk to and deal with still sees VMware as the market leader in the enterprise/high-end market. Maybe this will change in the future and maybe not. But VMware ESX was the product of choice for usually conservative CIO’s. I don’t think that’s going to change very quickly, no matter how good the Microsoft "Longhorn" solution will be (partnered by Xen).
VMware has the technology lead right now, but in the future, we will have closer competition between the alternative players and VMware. VMware will have to continue to differentiate themselves and compete by increasing integration with other operating systems and ensuring that their accompnaying technologies rovide a superior overall solution than that provided by their copetitors.