WHERE NEXT?
VMware under Maritz still has several options open to it. It can maintain its high-end corporate dominance and expand market share as far as a richly featured product set will take it. It could seek some accommodation with Microsoft where it adds management features to virtualized environments that have a heavy percentage of Hyper-V virtual machines. Or it could stake its future on supplying virtual machine technology to cloud computing service providers, who are likely to have their own special needs for it. "Paul Maritz is very experienced in large enterprise computing. He would know how to keep moving that function bar up, up, and up," says Bittman.
VMware under Maritz still has several options open to it. It can maintain its high-end corporate dominance and expand market share as far as a richly featured product set will take it. It could seek some accommodation with Microsoft where it adds management features to virtualized environments that have a heavy percentage of Hyper-V virtual machines. Or it could stake its future on supplying virtual machine technology to cloud computing service providers, who are likely to have their own special needs for it. "Paul Maritz is very experienced in large enterprise computing. He would know how to keep moving that function bar up, up, and up," says Bittman.
Yet there's a huge prize to be won among small and medium-sized businesses, where only 1% to 2% of servers are virtualized. Microsoft no doubt has that in mind when it makes an option available in the operating system at a low price.
Maritz has plenty of choices for how VMware might respond. The only certainty is that it will be anything but business as usual as the next major round of competition gets under way in virtualization.
