virtualization

Website Tip: VM4All.com

March 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

A small pointer to an online resource you may find to be very useful: courtesy of Eric Sloof from The Netherlands, you can browse a complete repository of VMware tools at VM4All.com, including their licensing terms, description, creator credits and link to download / maker.

From the about page:

VMware’s virtualization technology has become the industry standard for virtualization in the enterprise. More and more people are writing software based on the SDK and created a lot of little handy tools. On the other side there are some larger company’s who also created all kinds of applications to support VMware ESX server and Virtual Center. The vm4all.com website provides a complete list of all these tools and applications.

Industry Analyst Tony Asaro Joins Virtual Iron As Chief Strategy Officer

March 12, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Virtual Iron today announced the hiring of former Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst and consultant Tony Asaro as Chief Strategy Officer. In his role, Asaro will focus on business strategy, ecosystem development, evangelism and education of Virtual Iron to the market and complement the company’s worldwide go-to-market efforts.

Earlier this year, Virtual Iron raised $ 20 million in private equity financing. Also check out our video interview with Mike Grandinetti, VP & Chief Marketing Officer with the company.

Asaro has been in the high tech industry for 22 years in a wide range of roles including sales, systems engineering, business development, marketing and as an entrepreneur. Most recently, he was with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a leading industry analyst and consulting firm. During his tenure there, Asaro was a trusted adviser to many established and emerging infrastructure vendors including EMC, NetApp, and VMware to name just a few. He provided strategic guidance and consulting on product direction, positioning, and business development and is considered a thought leader on IT infrastructure, data center environments, storage systems and networks, virtualization, power and cooling issues, and disaster recovery solutions.

“Tony Asaro is a great addition to the Virtual Iron team as we continue to expand our presence in the fast-growing server virtualization market,” said Ed Walsh, president and CEO of Virtual Iron. “We will leverage Tony’s deep experience and abilities to sharpen our business, marketing and product strategies and continue to increase our visibility across our user, partner and channel communities.”

“Implementing server virtualization is one of the highest priorities in IT regardless of size, industry or region in the world,” said Tony Asaro. “Virtual Iron has a field-proven solution that our customers find is easy to use, cost effective and provides them all of the advanced management capabilities needed for a true server virtualization environment. Virtual Iron will continue to focus on raising its visibility to this wide audience so they know they have a choice – one that has been validated by over 1,500 end users just like them.”

[Source: VMBlog]

Microsoft Acquires Desktop Virtualization Software Maker Kidaro

March 12, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Kidaro, a young company that helps businesses manage their collection of virtual machines. The financial details involved in the acquisition of the startup, which counts 35 employees, remained undisclosed, although Valleywag is calling it around $ 100 million.

According to CNET’s Ina Fried, Microsoft said the technology will make it easier for businesses to manage application compatibility challenges, ultimately spurring faster Vista adoption as well as broadening the use of virtual machines within enterprises.

“The challenge we have with Virtual PC today is it doesn’t have enterprise-level management and deployment with it and the user experience could be improved,” said Gavriella Schuster, a senior director in Microsoft’s Windows unit.

Schuster said that Kidaro’s technology helps on both scores. In addition to tools for setting up and managing virtual machines, Kidaro has technology that makes virtual machines less jarring for users, making them appear to be part of the standard desktop.

Kidaro’s technology will be added to a future version of Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. The collection of tools is sold as an add-on to Microsoft’s Software Assurance program for volume license customers. Other things in the collection include an application virtualization technology known as SoftGrid and asset management tools that stem from Microsoft’s AssetMetrix acquisition.

While perhaps not a mainstream way for businesses to move to Vista, Schuster said Microsoft thinks some companies will find it more palatable with Kidaro’s tools to run older, Vista incompatible applications via a Windows XP virtual machine.

Update – from the Windows Virtualization Team Blog:

I’m told that the three founders of Kidaro will be joining Microsoft and play similar roles here, and that the plan is to keep Kidaro’s R&D team in Israel. That makes sense since Microsoft already has an R&D center in Israel.

So if you’re keeping track, this acquisition is roughly 45 days after we announced the acquisition of Calista Technologies.

[Source: Techmeme]

Get Maximum Exposure: Hire A Blonde Executive Who Forgets Your Virtualization Company Slogan But Knows How To Do Card Tricks

March 12, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Never one to shy away from extensive research, Virtualization.com has analyzed its visitor statistics for our extensive VMworld Europe 2008 video coverage, proving that eyeballs for interviews don’t necessarily follow the trail of the most reputable interviewees or eloquent answers. Allow us to share a few proven online marketing techniques, which apparently skew the video metrics and raise exposure dramatically:

Blonde female executives get more attention than male gurus

For reasons beyond our understanding, the Virtualization.com audience prefers watching a smart blonde female executive 4 times more than a seasoned male expert from the virtualization trenches. Our professional advice: start shaving your legs, guys …

CEOs who pretend to forget their great company base line

We love technology gossip sites like Valleywag.com . And apparently, your hard-to-reach target audience of CIO’s, venture capitalists & IT managemers is much like us and seems to spend less time analyzing dull virtualization reports from Gartner or IDC and more time on popular, snarky tech blogs. Raise the attention you get from folks at Silicon Valley by instructing your foreign language CEO to make a remarkable introduction (over 1.600 views and counting). Make sure to reference the interview on your own corporate website too, so nobody misses out on it. Lots of free publicity guaranteed!

Demonstrations are more attractive when popular YouTube keywords are included

Due to the nature of flash video hosting websites, it always helps to spice your boring software product presentations with some interactive tricks of general interest. Card tricks prove to be such a popular category on YouTube (26.000 results and counting). This is also how the Marketing Manager with Veeam garnered a lot more attention for his VMworld booth during the event and for ever after on those flash video hosting platforms … After the magic, he continues with a demo on their software solutions. Unfortunately our web analytics do not reveal how many of those card lovers understand the tricks & benefits Veeam software could provide them.

For now the PR and marketing officers at Veeam seem to rule at this game and take away the main prize for maximizing their VMworld Europe 2008 exposure with a double entry in this Top 3!

We are already looking forward to our interview with the naturally blonde Diane Greene, CEO of VMware. At this point, it’s unclear if she knows about the foreign-accent-amnesia combined with card-trickery skills the interviewees above seem to have mastered. But we promise to dig into the matter!

Layered Technologies Secures $ 11 Million in Private Investment

March 12, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Layered Technologies has secured $11 million in funding from private equity firm Enhanced Equity Fund and its founding investor Pangloss International. The new cash will provide Layered Technologies with working capital to expand, develop new products, and accelerate sales and marketing efforts within new enterprise markets.

Layered Technologies is a provider of on-demand hosting, utility computing solutions and web services with clients in over 120 countries. The Texas-based company offers a grid hosting service as well as virtual private data centers.

“We see great potential for Layered Technologies to play a key role in shaping the future of grid computing and virtualized services within the hosting marketplace,” said David Howe, Managing General Partner for Enhanced Equity Fund.

[Source: Data Center Knowledge]

Will Increasing Memory Costs Slow Down Virtualization Growth?

March 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Memory vendor Kingston Technology (check out the short interview we did at their VMWorld Europe 2008 booth) says memory in industry standard servers is causing virtualization projects to become unnecessarily expensive and that fears over warranties are holding back users from upgrading.

“Not having enough memory restricts the number of virtual machines, and also restricts the overall performance. Not having enough memory is either down to improper planning, or in most cases, the inability to purchase enough memory due to the higher cost of OEM memory,” the company said.

Hewlett-Packard does not seem to share their vision:

Rhys Austin, who runs the virtualization practice for industry standard servers at HP agreed that too little memory will affect virtualiszation performance but strongly rejected Kingston’s assertion that users were worried about price or warranties.

[Source: PC Advisor]