Nemertes Research contends that the Citrix buy will lend "significant financial and marketing muscle to XenSource" in its bid to compete with VMware, and that fiercer competition will lead to more innovation in virtualization technology.
DiDio, for one, does not see Microsoft deemphasizing its partnership with Citrix. "Microsoft needs Citrix in this thing as much as Citrix needs Microsoft," she says. "Citrix has wonderful desktop virtualization, wonderful storage management. Microsoft is late to the market on a lot of this stuff."
Microsoft "absolutely" will continue working with Citrix, Microsoft's Adam says, noting that the companies announced a deeper partnership on desktop virtualization earlier this year. As a result, Citrix will develop a desktop connection broker that will enable centralized desktop management for Windows shops, he says.
Sun
The Xen hypervisor provides the foundation for Sun's x86 virtualization product, known as xVM. Sun isn't alone here; practically every one of VMware's major competitors uses Xen, including Oracle, Novell, Red Hat, Virtual Iron and Citrix. Each is doing work to make sure the Xen hypervisor is more robust, but more importantly each is trying to differentiate itself with management tools, Bittman says.
Bittman thinks Sun poses VMware the second-biggest threat behind Microsoft. "My view is if Sun doesn't do it, it's going to be a two-horse race," he says.
The virtualization market is largely untapped; only about 10 per cent of servers are virtualized. VMware and Microsoft could win nine out of every ten customers and there would still be a sizable chunk available for Sun, not to mention Citrix and other competitors, analysts say.
"There's lots of room for lots of companies to grow in this arena without impacting VMware's market share," says analyst Charlie Burns of Saugatuck Technology.
Sun typically has not done well in the software market, but Bittman is optimistic because virtualization is pretty close to Sun's expertise - managing hardware.
