Internal Memo From VMWare Staff Criticizes Microsoft And Questions Its Partnership With Citrix

When Microsoft issued a long press release last week on its ‘Vision and Strategy to Accelerate Virtualization Adoption ‘, the internal sales channel at VMWare apparently got a memo downplaying MSFT’s announcements and instructing their commercial team to further question the Microsoft-Citrix partnership and its ability to survive Redmond’s plans with virtualization in front of their clients.

Here are some of the quotes a blogger reposted from an obtained copy of the memo (emphasis ours)

…Microsoft announced a hodge-podge of items related to virtualization in a desperate attempt to make it look like it had a new, coherent vision and strategy for virtualization…

…MSFT includes many recycled items in the announcement to make it look substantive. In actuality, they are just rehashes of old items. Microsoft is not delivering anything new, substituting marketing in place of real substance…

…The new items are a collection of loosely connected pieces thrown together to look like a coherent virtualization plan. Microsoft is still talking vision…

…Microsoft’s announcement introduces new conflicts into the Microsoft-Citrix business partnership and begs the question “When will Microsoft dump Citrix and take all of the business for itself?” Is this just a partnership of convenience for Microsoft until it ships its own product?…

…Tell your prospects that are considering Citrix, that MSFT will soon cut Citrix out of the loop…and Citrix is allowing it to happen…

…New Conflict #1: Microsoft System Center or Citrix XenServer for Management…This declaration hits at the heart of Citrix’s stated business model for virtualization – to generate revenue from the management of Windows VMs with Citrix XenCenter. System Center and XenCenter are clearly competitors…

…New Conflict #2: Calista acquisition creates more direct competition with Citrix SpeedScreen (ICA)..This acquisition strikes at Citrix’s core business since ICA is Citrix’s key differentiator and competes with RDP…

Microsoft and Citrix are longtime virtualization partners, but VMware is using Microsoft’s own advances in the market to argue that the two companies are also becoming bigger competitors with each other — despite their recently announced plan to develop interoperability between Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008. As Microsoft prepares to launch Windows Server 2008 — featuring the Hyper-V hypervisor — next month, the battle for VMware’s server virtualization market share lead should grow even more intense. Which makes it all more interesting for us, of course 🙂