Amazon is a big boon for Xen

I am working with a startup which is pitching a Xen based solution to enterprises and telco’s. In the past years it was difficult to answer the question whether Xen was as good as vmware. This startup answers this questions by saying “It is good enough for Amazon”. 9 times out of 10 that silences most of the critics in the room. This will only get easier.

Symantec is also embedding Xen with their volume manager and storage products to create a competitor to virtual infrastructure.  It is also rumored that Xen should do 10s of million kind of revenue this year for Citrix. Which is small compared to vmware, but a 10-20 fold increase over last year.  The rate of change is more interesting.

VMW vs MSFT

 

Over the years people have learnt that there are some battles you can’t fight and win against Microsoft. You may look at the list below and say, “huh” that might have been true of others, but Vmware is different. I won’t argue with you, some companies like Apple have beaten Microsoft on these points, but the odds are low and it’s a difficult play to pull off.

 

• Features: you can’t win by having more features
• Slick UI: Microsoft will design the best UIs ultimately (Apple being the only exception to this rule)
• Desktop Oriented Software: MS had demonstrated uncanny ability to assimilate any features that came out on the desktop
• Speed: Lotus 123 vs Microsoft Excel, they eventually got it right and beat the speed
• Integrated Developer Systems: MS has a lock on this, they will integrate virtualization into visual studio, debuggers etc, making there solution the best
• Price: you can’t undercut Microsoft on price and sustain the business model

 

So if you are Vmware what do you do?  Vmware is in  hyper growth mode and in such a phase people are so busy trying to deal with the day to day operations that most thinking becomes incremental, not because the people are not smart, they are incredibly smart: but there is no time to stop and ponder. Incremental thinking usually results in product roadmaps and directions which will fall in one of the six buckets above.

 

If you are VMW how can you beat MSFT: hypervisor, Virtual Infrastructure or Management & Automation or something else? MSFT, Xen (Citrix) and others pose a thread to the “hypervisor”. NTAP, EMC and other storage/networking vendors pose a threat to the Virtual Infrastructure Layer. Management & Automation is already a crowded market. So how does VMW find a blue ocean to expand into?