vmware

While the open-source crowd gets (rightly) excited by Linux's growing market share, three companies are pulling the rug out from under the feet of traditional operating systems.

Red Hat is winning in Linux while IBM cleans up the Unix market. But those are increasingly yesterday's markets as Microsoft, Google, and VMware create different breeds of operating system, each tuned to the strength of its product portfolio.

The easiest to understand are Google and VMware. Google, with its Linux distribution Chrome OS, is placing secondary emphasis on the operating system and primary emphasis on where it takes you: the … Read more

VMWare's acquisition of SpringSource this week is a significant development in the history of the Java development platform.

I have been working closely with VMWare for some time now, and I know a little bit about how the company sees its role in the cloud. The acquisition of the commercial open-source middleware/framework company makes perfect sense to me.

SpringSource gives VMWare a development "platform," of sorts, to deliver in VMWare-based cloud services and a unique declarative environment in which to define both application construction and deployment architectures. The vision painted by SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson speaks … Read more

I've been writing a lot lately about SpringSource, largely because it has demonstrated a big vision (nothing less than the redefinition of the application server and an end-to-end application story), and so I wasn't terribly surprised today to see VMware buy SpringSource for $420 million. On roughly $20 million in sales, much of that services, it's a rich valuation, but one that is absolutely deserved given SpringSource's potential.

In fact, it's almost certain that SpringSource sold too early, at least as measured the size of potential exits it could have had given a bit more … Read more

VMware's financial results from the second quarter of 2009 are out. They beat revenue and income estimates but those estimates were far less euphoric than during VMware's spectacular growth days of a few years back. Second-quarter revenue was $456 million, flat from the second quarter of 2008. Operating income on a GAAP basis was down 38 percent from the year-ago quarter and down 14 percent non-GAAP.

International revenue saw about 3 percent growth but this was counterbalanced by a similar decline in the U.S. International revenue is now almost equal to those in the U.S.--$… Read more

Old dogs may struggle with new tricks, but they seem to be able to figure out new licenses.

In a shocking move, Microsoft announced Monday the release of Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC).

The news reflects Microsoft's continued interest in lobotomizing its virtualization competition through low prices, but also the recognition that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat, Novell, and others in the open-source camp.

But the truly startling news is that LinuxIC is being released under the GNU General Public License (version 2). Microsoft once called GPL anti-American. … Read more

In a recent and so-far relatively obscure video, VMware CEO Paul Maritz offers, at times, a sharp critique of the Intel chip architecture and the challenges of getting it into cell phones.

At the TiEcon 2009 conference in mid-May, Maritz gave a brief oral history of the Intel x86 chip architecture. He noted its shortcomings and the challenges presented by ARM, the chip design that powers most of the world's cell phones and will power Netbooks running on Google's just-announced Chrome operating system.

The video has been made available by TechPulse360.

"Consumer devices came along and there … Read more

Could VMware be the next Novell? That's the question Gartner managing vice president and chief of research for Infrastructure David Cappuccio asks in a provocative post, one that bears further discussion. While VMware is at the top of its game, there are several historical analogs between VMware and Novell.

I'll let you read Cappuccio's excellent post for his full argument, but the crux of it is that in the face of dominant but pricey technology, many buyers will turn to "good enough" to fill their needs. For Novell, that competition to its 90 percent market … Read more

It's no secret you can run various flavors of Windows on Intel Macs using Apple's Bootcamp or other popular virtualization software options like Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. Any of these work great if you need to run Windows software on your Mac or even test beta software worry free, but a fairly recent discovery of mine might be a better choice. VirtualBox is the free, cross-platform, open-source virtualization software I used to get the Windows 7 beta running on a Mac, and it just received a major update.

VirtualBox 3.0 (Windows or Mac) lets you create … Read more

Virtualization company VMware says that its new platform to let organizations virtualize smartphones and mobile devices will show up in handsets next year.

The mobile phone is now as important to businesses at desktop computers, and acts as a mobile computer in many cases, said Stephen Herrod, VMware chief technology officer, speaking at the Interop industry conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

Although Herrod said the project is still in its "early stages," researchers at VMware are working on a VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform, which will create a virtual machine for mobile devices, allowing users to move their … Read more