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SpringSource Snapped Up By VMware

August 19, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

(We’re playing catch-up on news due to holiday, apologies for the late notices)

VMware recently announced a major step forward in its journey to help simplify IT by entering into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management. VMware and SpringSource, itself an acquiring party earlier this year when it purchased Hyperic, plan to deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures.

VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource’s stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.

SpringSource is the innovator and driving force behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes, and management tools. In just five years, SpringSource has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, and is rapidly delivering a new generation of commercial products and services. VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community.

Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers. These solutions will allow customers to rapidly build new enterprise and web applications and run and manage these applications in the same dynamic, scalable and cost-efficient vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can also host and manage their existing applications, providing an evolutionary path to the future.

Guest Post: “Fault tolerance a new key feature for virtualization”

August 6, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Below is a an article originally published on the guest author’s blog. Who’s the author, you ask?

Kevin Lawton! Bio: pioneer in x86 virtualization, serial entrepreneur, business and technology visionary, prolific idea creator, news and business book junkie. Founding team member in a microprocessor startup, the author and lead for two Open Source projects, a public speaker, and at the forefront of what is now a multi-billion dollar x86 virtualization industry. I have a degree in computer science and started my career at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

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Fault tolerance a new key feature for virtualization

VM migration has been a key feature and enabling technology which has differentiated VMware from Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Though as you may know, Windows Server 2008 R2 is slated for broad availability on or before October 22, 2009 (also the Windows 7 GA date), and Hyper-V will then support VM migration. So you may be wondering, what key new high-tech features will constitute the next battleground for differentiation amongst the virtualization players?

Five-Nines (99.999%) Meets Commodity Hardware

One such key feature is very likely to be fault tolerance (FT) — the ability for a running VM to suffer hardware failure on one machine, and to be restarted on another machine without losing any state. This is not just HA (High Availability), it’s CA (Continuous Availability)! And I believe it’ll be part of the cover-charge that virtualization vendors (VMware, Citrix/XenSource, Microsoft, et al) and providers such as Amazon will have to offer to stay competitive. When I talk about fault tolerance, I don’t mean using special/exotic hardware solutions — I’m talking about software-only solutions which handle fault tolerance in the hypervisor and/or other parts of the software stack.

Here’s a quick summary of where the various key vendors are w.r.t. fault tolerance. Keep watch of this space, because the VM migration battle is nearly over now.

VMware’s product line now offers Fault Tolerance, which they conceptually introduced at VMworld 2008. This was perhaps the biggest wow-factor feature VMware talked about at that VMworld. FT is not supported in VMware Essentials, Essentials Plus or vSphere Standard editions. It’s supported in more advanced(/expensive) versions.

In the Xen camp, there are two distinct FT efforts, Kemari and Remus. Integration/porting to Xen 4.0 are on theroadmap. If/when that occurs, the Xen ecosystem will benefit. After battle-testing, it’s easy to conceive of Amazon offering FT as a premium service. It does after all chew through more network capacity, and will necessitate extra high level logic on their part. There’s also a commercial FT solution for XenServer from Marathon, called everRun VM.

Microsoft appears to be leveraging a partnership with Marathon for their initial virtualization FT solution. This is probably smart given it allows Microsoft a way to quickly compete on fault tolerance, with a partner that’s been doing FT for a living. One would imagine this option will come at a premium though, perhaps a revenue opportunity for Microsoft for big-money customers, with an associated disadvantage vis-à-vis similar features based on free Xen technology and massive scale virtualization (clouds). That may make Marathon a strategic M&A target.

Licensing Issues, Part II

Just when you thought software-in-a-VM issues were mostly resolved, the same questions may be raised again for FT, given there is effectively a shadow copy of any given FT-protected VM. It’s not hard to imagine Microsoft aggressively taking advantage of this situation, given they live at both virtualization/OS and application layers of the stack.

Networking is Key

Fault tolerance of VMs is yet another consumer and driver of high bandwidth, low latency networking. The value in the data center is trending from the compute hardware to the networking. FT is another way-point in the evolution of that trend, allowing continuous availability on commodity hardware. You probably won’t run it on all your workloads (they will run with a performance penalty), but you might start out with the most critical stateful workloads. If you want to do this on any scale, or with flexibility, architect with lots of networking capabilities. For zero-sum IT budgets, this would mean cheaper hardware and better networking, something that might be a little bitter-sweet for Cisco, given its entrance into the server market.

Earnings: VMware’s Q2 2009

July 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware today announced financial results for the second quarter 2009 (emphasis ours):

Revenues for the second quarter were $456 million, flat from the second quarter of 2008.
Non-GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $96 million, a decrease of 14% from the second quarter of 2008. GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $38 million, a decrease of 38% from the second quarter of 2008.
Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $80 million, or $0.20 per diluted share, compared to $92 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2008. GAAP net income for the second quarter was $33 million, or $0.08 per diluted share, compared to $52 million, or $0.13 per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2008.
Cash and cash equivalents were $2.3 billion and total deferred revenues were $934 million as of June 30, 2009. Compared to the same period a year ago, cash increased 48% and deferred revenue increased 30%. Since the beginning of 2009, cash increased 24% and deferred revenue increased 7%.
Non-GAAP operating cash flows for the quarter were $233 million, an increase of 19% from the second quarter of 2008. GAAP operating cash flows were $243 million, an increase of 62% from the second quarter of 2008. For the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2009, non-GAAP operating cash flows were $910 million and GAAP operating cash flows were $1 billion.

US revenues for the second quarter declined 3% to $234 million from the second quarter of 2008. International revenues for the second quarter grew 3% to $222 million from the second quarter of 2008.

Services revenues, which include software maintenance and professional services, were $228 million, an increase of 32% from the second quarter of 2008. Driven by the challenging macro economic environment, license revenues were $228 million, a decline of 20% from last year.

Recent Strategic Announcements and Highlights:

On May 21, VMware announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 4 with the support of an extensive partner ecosystem and customers around the globe. In June, VMware vSphere 4 was named the Best of Interop 2009 Grand Prize Winner and won the Best of Interop Award in the Cloud Computing and Virtualization category at Interop Las Vegas.
VMware announced record storage performance for VMware vSphere 4, outperforming any virtualization solution on the market and nearly quadrupling its previous record. According to data collected with VMware Capacity Planner, most demanding databases usually require a few thousand IOPS in storage performance. For example, an Oracle database averages 1,280 IOPS for a 4-way Oracle virtual machine. VMware vSphere 4 exceeds this requirement from a single server — and can power up to: 700,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, 273 4-way Oracle databases.
VMware and HP expanded the companies’ strong relationship with VMware signing an OEM agreement to integrate HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software into the VMware vCenter(TM) suite and working with HP on new datacenter management initiatives. In addition, HP has integrated VMware ThinApp(TM) with the HP Client Automation policy-based management platform. Both of these initiatives will help customers seamlessly and cost-effectively manage their physical and virtual datacenter and desktop initiatives.
On July 13, VMware announced advancements in virtualization management with the general availability of two new products: VMware vCenter AppSpeed and VMware vCenter Chargeback. VMware also announced a major release of VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4. These new management products simplify and automate key IT processes such as application performance monitoring, chargeback, and management of dev/test environments to increase IT productivity in the datacenter — delivering more value to customers as they scale out their virtual environments.

Earnings: Citrix’ Q2 2009

July 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Citrix today reported financial results for the second quarter of fiscal 2009 ended June 30, 2009. In the second quarter of fiscal 2009, Citrix achieved revenue of $393 million, compared to $392 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2008.

Non-GAAP net income in the second quarter of fiscal 2009 was $72 million, or $0.39 per diluted share, compared to $71 million, or $0.38 per diluted share, in the comparable period last year.

Non-GAAP net income excludes the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations and stock-based compensation expense and the tax effects related to those items. In addition, Non-GAAP net income for the second quarter of 2009 excludes charges recorded in connection with the restructuring program that the company implemented in January 2009, and the tax effects related to those items.

In reviewing the second quarter results for 2009, compared to the second quarter of 2008:

Product license revenue decreased 15 percent;
Revenue from license updates grew 9 percent;
Online services revenue grew 18 percent;
Technical services revenue, which is comprised of consulting, education and technical support, grew 3 percent;
Revenue increased in the America’s region by 3 percent, decreased in the EMEA region by 12 percent, and decreased in the Pacific region by 4 percent;
Deferred revenue totaled $538 million, compared to $476 million on June 30, 2008;
GAAP operating margin was 10 percent for the quarter, and non-GAAP operating margin was 22 percent for the quarter, excluding the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations, stock-based compensation expense and costs associated with the restructuring program;
Cash flow from operations was $86 million; and
The company repurchased 1.3 million shares at an average price of $30.32.

During the second quarter of 2009, Citrix:

Announced the availability of the Citrix Receiver application on the Apple App Store. The app gives iPhone and iPod touch users access to their Windows applications and documents from anywhere;
Unveiled Citrix NetScaler VPX, a new software-based virtual appliance version of its industry-leading NetScaler MPX hardware appliance product line;
Announced upgrades to Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V that adds advanced virtualization management capabilities to two of the industry’s fastest growing virtualization platforms;
Announced nCore technology that allows its high-end Citrix NetScaler appliances to deliver rich Web 2.0 applications and cloud services for more users with no new hardware investments required;
Announced the addition of three new appliance models to its powerful Citrix NetScaler product line – NetScaler MPX 9500, MPX 7500 and MPX 5500;
Announced that LG-Nortel will distribute the Citrix NetScaler product line to enterprise customers in the Korean market; and
Unveiled Citrix Dazzle – a self-service “storefront” for enterprise applications. Dazzle gives corporate employees 24×7 self-service access to a broad array of applications, desktops and content, allowing them to choose exactly what they need, when they need it.

Google Loses Engineering Director To VMware

July 15, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

After nearly 5 years with the company, Engineering Director Mark Lucovsky has left Google for a role with VMware, TechCrunch has learned.

Before Google, Lucovsky worked at DEC and then Microsoft for 16 years, eventually gaining the title of “Distinguished Engineer.” He had been the principle architect on Windows NT, which would eventually evolve into Windows XP. Lucovsky was also the architect of Microsoft’s Hailstorm project to port older Microsoft products into .NET.

A famous anecdote recounted on TechCrunch:

But Lucovsky may be best known for the role he played in a complete and utter meltdown that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once had. As the NT architect, Lucovsky was clearly pretty vital to Microsoft, so when he went in for a meeting with Ballmer in 2004 to let him know he was leaving, you can be sure the CEO was a bit on edge.

“Just tell me it’s not Google,” Ballmer reportedly said according to court documents (for a case surrounding another Google ex-Microsoft hire). When Lucovsky said it was Google, Ballmer allegedly picked up a chair and threw it across the room.

Windows Azure Cloud Computing Service: Release Date And Pricing Details

July 15, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Microsoft has shared details on how much it will charge companies that want to use its Windows Azure cloud computing service – which will compete with the likes of Amazon WS and Force.com – when it is released in final form later this Fall. Redmond announced a couple of plans, including one that charges purely on consumption and another that offers discounted rates for those that agree to a 6-month commitment.

The cloud operating system isn’t launching in final form until Microsoft’s upcoming Professional Developer Conference (November 2009), but an executive apparently had informed CNET that the pricing announcement would be made at this week’s Worldwide Partner Conference, which is taking place in New Orleans.

Microsoft said it will charge 12 cents per hour for computing, 15 cents per gigabyte for storage and 10 cents per 10,000 storage transactions. For network bandwidth, the software maker is charging between 10 cents and 15 cents per gigabyte. The discount plan comes in two forms and offers a 15 percent to 30 percent discount off the consumption charges. It requires a six-month commitment, with overage charges billed at the regular rates. After six months, the pricing reverts to the standard Azure rates.

Microsoft also announced pricing for its SQL Azure database, charging $9.99 for the basic Web edition, including up to a 1GB relational database and $99.99 for the Business Edition, which includes up to a 10GB database.

The software maker said it would promise 99.95 percent reliability for its compute and connectivity and 99.9 percent for role instance and storage. Ultimately, though, Ray Ozzie has said that trust will play a big role in which company businesses are willing to choose to host their applications.