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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.
After joining the Advisory Board for Embotics, which we just reported raised a $4 million Series B round of funding, Stephen Pollack is also joining the Advisory Board of Enomaly.
Stephen Pollack is a recognized leader in the virtualization industry who founded PlateSpin (acquired by Novell earlier this year). With the addition of Pollack, the Advisory Board will continue to help guide Embotics’ direction, organization and strategy for product and company growth.
See Reuven Cohen’s blog post on the addition of Pollack.
It’s not the first time VMware quietly acquires a company (remember Blue Lane?). Now it appears as the virtualization juggernaut has also picked up Tungsten Graphics as recently as last month.
From the FAQ on their website:
Has TG been acquired? Yes, VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics on November 26, 2008. The addition of the TG team will augment VMware’s ability to deliver industry-leading 3D graphics virtualization capabilities.
How does VMware fit into the landscape of open source graphics? VMware has had a history of developing technology to enable graphics capabilities to guest software running in VMware virtual machines. This work includes special drivers that are optimized for VMware’s virtual hardware, that consequently offer better performance and additional features such as arbitrary screen resizing and multihead support. The video driver was released as open source in 2002, with development done upstream in X.org’s git repository.
What does this mean for my open source driver project? Gallium makes it much easier to create 3D drivers that support multiple API’s on multiple operating systems and utilize multiple GPU architectures. Our team will continue to drive the Gallium infrastructure forward and keep it up to date with the latest advances occuring in the graphics arena. The means your Gallium based driver project will benefit from these enhancements.
Embotics last week announced the closing of a $4 million Series B round of financing, led by Covington Capital Corporation. The financing will be used to advance product development for Embotics’ server virtualization management technology and expand global sales and operations.
Embotics’ products allow companies to manage server sprawl efficiently while mitigating risk and reducing costs. As enterprises continue to require greater insight and control over their virtualized environments, many are looking for solutions, such as Embotics’ V-Commander, to manage and control their virtual machines while fitting seamlessly into their existing technology architecture.
HP today introduced a software portfolio that helps businesses transition from traditional, distributed desktop computing to a virtualized client environment. Building on the company’s expansive client virtualization solutions, HP Virtual Client Essentials is an advanced software portfolio that includes multimedia, brokering and streaming solutions. The software is specifically designed to deliver rich user experiences in client virtualization environments such as server-based computing, HP Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), HP Blade PCs or Workstations, and streaming client environments.
The HP Virtual Client Essentials portfolio includes HP Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Enhancements and HP Remote Graphics Software, two protocol options that deliver richer multimedia experiences when deploying virtual computing solutions. It also features HP Session Allocation Manager (SAM) – a session broker for remote clients that provides connectivity and advanced management capabilities – and HP Image Manager for streaming operating systems and applications.
HP RDP Enhancements provides easy, out-of-the box multimedia and USB device support for customers standardized on HP thin clients using the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol who want to improve the end-user computing experience for employees while maximizing the number of users per server.
Available next month for all Microsoft Windows XPe HP thin clients, HP RDP Enhancements will be pre-installed and licensed on most HP thin clients to provide users with a single-logon, full-screen virtual desktop experience for VMware View and Microsoft Terminal Services using a variety of session brokers. Users simply log in to their virtual client session to enjoy real-time, network-based multimedia content with full stereo audio – such as interactive training, demos and live webcasts – across a variety of multimedia formats. Linux-based thin client support is expected in the near future.
HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS) is HP’s recommended choice for customers needing secure, high-performance, collaborative remote desktop access to the richest multimedia and workstation-class applications. It can now run on any server or blade-hosted client in VMware data center environments and is available at flexible and affordable new license rates based on the user platform.
Additionally, HP RGS provides expanded, real-time collaboration features to allow multiple professionals working from remote locations to see and share content-rich visualizations including 2-D design, 3-D solid modeling, rendering, simulation, full-motion video, heavy flash animation and intense Web 2.0 pages.
HP RGS also allows users to connect with one or many remote systems for access to high-performance applications and resources when and where they need them. This feature has been enhanced with multi-session cut, copy and paste functionality so information can be moved directly from and to applications running on independent Windows desktop machine sessions.
HP Session Allocation Manager (SAM) is administrative software that brokers network connections to seamlessly connect end users with their virtual client environments. HP SAM is optimized for customers with mixed virtual client environments, and offers support for both virtual machine resources and physical, dedicated blade clients.
With expanded support for PCs and HP thin clients running Linux, Microsoft Windows and thin client operating systems, HP SAM also features session timers that measure the users’ CPU activity and allow IT administrators to disconnect users from virtual resources after a specified period of inactivity to help maximize compute resource usage. Additionally, IT managers can take advantage of HP SAM’s new, enhanced diagnostic tools to check for common configuration or environmental issues, helping ensure installations and deployments run smoothly.
HP RDP Enhancements will be available via download at no additional charge for HP thin clients with Microsoft Windows XP Embedded beginning in January 2009. The software is expected to be preloaded as a standard offering on most Windows and Linux-based HP thin clients in the first half of the year.
Microsoft will offer today the first public beta release of its BizTalk Server 2009 enterprise connectivity software, which can take advantage of virtualization and enhanced failover clustering featured in Windows Server 2008.
Clustering capabilities let BizTalk be deployed in multi-site clustering environments without additional software or hardware.