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After Virtual Iron saw his longtime marketing executive Mike Grandinetti leave for his own venture in May, it went looking for someone to replace him, and it now looks as if they’ve found just the woman for the job.
Susan Roberts will replace Grandinetti as Senior Director of Marketing, after a career at Dassault Systems where she was Director of Global Branding and Marketing Communications and Paxonix where she was Director of Marketing.
Stop the presses, RedHat and AMD just announced the end of Neverland.
The big News seems to be that RedHat and AMD managed to do Live migration of a virtual machine between 2 different CPU Vendors.
Now given my age and my starting alzheimer, LinuxKongress 2005 in Hamburg seems like ages ago,
As a speaker giving my Automating Xen Deployments talk early on the first conference day , I flew in the day before the conference and I needed some network connectivity so I sneeked into Ian Pratt’s tutorial about Xen. I remember sitting between Heinz Mauelshagen and my colegue Peter Leemans, Heinz was playing with SMP guests on a non SMP host and tried to figure out the limits.
If I recall correctly at the end of his session Ian was explaining Live Migration and demoing it by migrating a small virtual machine around between laptops of people in the front rows of the audience , Laptops from different architectures and from there started a discussion about CPU feature checking.
I asked around and some people actually remember parts of the discussion and the demo.
So for me , when RedHat and AMD claim today they have achieved in something new that was Never going to be implement they are either focusing on nitty details, like migrating from 2 brand new CPU’s to each other and forgetting the fundaments already existed for ages or just trying to get some positive news out of the door. In which they succeeded.
But I`m looking out for the next step in virtualization , not just mashups of things we’ve all been doing before, or things that are really similar to existing things.
We’re so sorry we missed this at the VMworld conference: VMblog is reporting that Falconstor, provider of data protection solutions, screwed up a giveaway at their booth to the extent of turning the contestants against them.
The company was giving away a Segway to a person who would wear one of their branded orange t-shirts, if he/she was lucky enough to be the winner of a drawing. Instead, the person that was announced as the winner wasn’t wearing said t-shirt at the time of the call, but was awarded the Segway anyway. The orange shirt-wearing crowd wasn’t pleased with that, so next to shouting bad words to the booth occupants, they also threw their t-shirts back at them.
Lucky for us, it was caught on video.
Thanks for reading us. We are bundling all our VMworld 2008 coverage in one handy page, go check it out now for more reports and videos!
Microsoft had people dressed up like medieval Venetian models at the hotel entrance of last week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas. They distributed dollar chips and flyers to anybody wearing a VMworld bag, with on it the website address VmwareCostsWayTooMuch.com, which led VMware customers and partners to a landing page, on which the headlines all redirect to the Microsoft Hyper-V portal.
The guerilla marketing tactics actually worked, with coverage from publications like NetworkWorld, ZDNet Blogs, Channel Marker, Virtualization Information, Burton Group’s Data Center Strategies blog, and others.
We ignore whether this smear marketing stunt was inspired by the US presidential campaign, but it was certainly not the first time Microsoft engages into heads-on advertising. Last time around it was targeted against Linux. However, we were never aware of Microsoft distributing any leaflets with GetTheFacts.com at the entrance of LinuxWorldExpo or LinuxTag. It is also quite funny to observe that Linux distributions (starting with SUSE) are now supported as Guest Operating Systems on Hyper-V and that Redmond advertises this feature extensively.
Microsoft even provides integration components and technical support for customers running select Linux distributions (limited to SUSE for the moment) as guest operating systems. IF history repeats itself, VMware can be reassured that in a few years this type of Microsoft campaign results in supporting a competing technology.
It took the VMware conference staff a little while to get notified about the leaflets and some more time before they got the hotel staff at The Venetion to stop the flyers from being handed out at the entrance of their annual user conference, attracting over 14.000 attendees to Las Vegas. It is estimated at least 4.000 flyers were distributed in the elapsed time.
The distributed 1 dollar chips were actually valid inside The Venetian Casino. This guerilla marketing initiative has cost at least 4.000 dollars in casino money, but the website and distribution must have cost a lot more.
It is hard to believe The Venetian did not make the connection between selling a few thousand ‘Dollar chips’ to Microsoft and concurrently renting their entire event facilities and rooms to VMware. Especially with those video cameras and security personell all over, it can be assumed Microsoft had obtained some sort of permission before handing out those free chips at the hotel entrance.
What do you think about this remarkable anti-VMware propaganda? Does it make MS look desperate as the new kid on the hypervisor block? Does it suit a multinational that runs entirely on ‘expensive‘ licenses to attack a ‘partner’ at its annual user conference over that very cost element? Do the facts that they present on their marketing website actually make sense? What boomerang effect can they expect? How would Microsoft react if Sun would hand out flyers at the gates of TechEd or DevDays with a catchy URL: GetOfficeForFreeAndStopPayingMicrosoft.Com. We look forward to seeing who will register that available domain. 🙂
As we all know, hypervisors are a commodity nowadays and just like Xen and Hyper-V, it must be said that ESX comes free of license cost too. At Virtualization.com, we like to think the value and related cost are no longer in that free naked hypervisor, but in the integrated management and extended tool sets that surround it.
If you were among those first 4.000 VMworld attendees, feel free to tell us how much you made with your Microsoft dollars on the gambling tables and if that was enough to cover/upgrade a VMware license?
Is marketing inherently manipulative, superficial, annoying and therefore evil? Do software marketing departments communicate the opportunities and advantages of their products in a honest way? Does it help to engage in FUD tactics against competitors?
At Virtualization.com we honestly don’t know… but we do think that when you are the market leader (hello, VMWare!), it doesn’t really strengthen your case when you point so much attention towards your once-great-partner Citrix. So why did Jeff Jennings at VMware mail the two messages below to his sales partners? This only seems to create the unwanted impression Citrix/XenServer is a real threat to VMware…
Let’s bear in mind these arguments were ‘only’ intended as marketing speak towards VMware sales partners.
Dear <name>,
Yesterday, Citrix announced the immediate availability of XenDesktop, a collection of technologies intended to provide a virtualized desktop experience. This competitive flash summarizes what was announced, explores specific claims that may cause confusion, and provides guidance for VMware sales professionals and partners.
Executive Summary
XenDesktop: What Can it Really Do, and How Much Does it Really Cost?
Citrix has widely promoted the concept of application streaming, and the idea that XenDesktop offers a “new PC at each log on”. This message has created confusion, because to achieve a “new PC at each log on”, multiple products must be integrated. Evidence of this confusion is also in the press. The Register recently published Citrix’s XenDesktop can fly you to the moon, an article about misleading product claims by Citrix. Brian Madden also examines Citrix XenDesktop pricing and competition with Citrix’s own XenApp (Presentation Server) products in his blog entry Citrix XenDesktop pricing is out-of-whack. One of the main value propositions of a virtual desktop is that all your applications work in a VDI environment. By bundling XenApp (Presentation Server) into their desktop solution, Citrix is making customers use XenApp (Presentation Server) for application deployment which doesn’t work for many applications. In addition, customers will have to pay the additional CAPEX and management costs for XenApp (Presentation Server). At a minimum, this includes server and storage hardware, and a Windows Server license for each XenApp server. Furthermore, customers may need to buy a Terminal Services CAL for each user.
XenDesktop: Complex, Poorly Integrated, Built on a Platform That Has an Uncertain Future
Citrix XenDesktop software is complex, consisting of different disparate components bundled together. The underlying XenServer virtualization platform is also unproven in enterprise environments. Both Citrix and Microsoft have stated that Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor will replace XenServer. Customers who deploy XenDesktop will use a virtualization platform that has an uncertain future. Several customers who have evaluated XenDesktop failed to deploy the complicated solution. Citrix’s XenDesktop keynote demonstration at their user conference, Synergy, didn’t even work.
VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is Built on a Proven Platform and is Easy to Deploy
In contrast to Citrix XenDesktop, customers that deploy VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) gain all the robustness and proven enterprise capabilities of the industry leading VMware Virtual Infrastructure (VI3) platform. VMware VDI is mature and much simpler to deploy than XenDesktop. XenDesktop deployments have up to eight different wizards, applications, and management consoles; VMware VDI uses two. Partners can have VMware VDI installed and working on their first customer visit, while XenDesktop can take days to get even a simple system deployed.
Bottom Line
We encourage VMware partners to clearly articulate how the virtualization platform is a strategic technology underlying virtual desktop deployments. Citrix’s claims about product features, such as whether XenDesktop includes application streaming or virtualization capabilities, and claims of disk storage savings without noting significant restrictions, should not go unchallenged.
Read more
Best regards,
Jeff Jennings
Vice President, Desktop Products and Solutions VMware
(As reported on May 27, 2008 by Brian Madden)
In Febrary 2008, Jeff Jennings alreay gave a list of reasons that tried to clarify the competitive advantage of VMware. Among them there’s a very interesting point about partnership between Microsoft and Citrix.
“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..”
We’re not sure what to think of VMware Team Fusion’ latest contest. If you upload a one-minute video about your experience in switching to VMware Fusion in order to run Windows on your Mac, or you write a blog post about it, you can win a set of prizes ranging from t-shirts, bumper stickers and an iPod Touch to a MacBook Air.
On itself, it’s just a nice, harmless marketing campaign to increase awareness about VMware Fusion on video sharing sites and gain extra backlinks for obvious reasons (might have something to do with the increasing pressure from competitors on VMware, aptly written out on bMighty). But we’d be surprised if tons of users go out of their way to create free marketing material for the company, even if the prizes (at least, the Apple products) are bound to spark interest here and there. It just seems it a bit too opportunistic, and they’re putting in an extra threshold by asking contestants to go through a bunch of instructions in a PDF file.
How about you, would you enter a contest to help VMware in getting more awareness for its desktop virtualization solutions?
