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Industry Moves: Rashied Akrum And Carina Rozendaal Join InstallFree

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InstallFree today announced that long time Application and Desktop Virtualization veterans Rashied Akrum and Carina Rozendaal will join InstallFree as the Vice President EMEA and Senior Director of Sales & Marketing EMEA respectively.

Both Akrum and Rozendaal bring a tremendous amount of experience to InstallFree, having previously worked at Microsoft through the acquisition of Softricity  in July 2006. Prior to the acquisition, they established and ran the EMEA Headquarters for Softricity for 4 years and were instrumental in creating the Application and Desktop Virtualization market in EMEA while developing a strong channel presence.
Akrum has over 21 years experience in IT leadership roles and has been successful in building European channels for new emerging IT technologies. He has extensive experience in sales, marketing, technical and management positions in software infrastructure and virtualization technologies including Softricity, Citrix, Terminal Server and MS Virtualization.
Rozendaal is a long time software virtualization pioneer having worked at Microsoft and established the EMEA market for Softricity with Akrum. She has extensive experience in the areas of sales, business development and marketing within infrastructure and virtualization technologies like Softricity, Citrix and Terminal Server. Rozendaal also brings her experience in channels in emerging technologies across Europe, Middle East & Africa with companies like CDG Europe, ASG Europe and Racal-Datacom.

Matrox Announces Multi-Monitor Support for Desktop Virtualization Environments using Citrix ICA and/or Microsoft RDP Protocols

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Matrox Graphics announces that Remote PowerDesk and Remote PowerSpace software are now supported with Matrox P690 Series graphics cards, in addition to the already supported Matrox Epica Series. These multi-display software suites provide extensive desktop management capabilities to improve the user experience with multi-monitor desktops hosted virtually using Microsoft RDP or Citrix ICA protocols.

Previously only available with Epica cards, Remote PowerDesk and Remote PowerSpace provide users of any remote platform with P690 add-in cards a vastly improved remote multi-display user experience. Advanced desktop management features such as Desktop Divider, window maximization to a single screen, window position recall, and virtual workspaces allow users to customize application behavior across multiple monitors.

Best-of-breed 2D image quality, unified drivers, and maximum power consumption ranging between 10W and 12W makes the P690 Series ideal for use in green computing environments, thin clients, fat clients (desktops), and docking stations.

Matrox P690 Series graphics cards are available immediately through their authorized resellers worldwide. Remote PowerDesk and Remote PowerSpace are available free of charge for Epica or P690 customers.

Roger Baskerville Leaves Citrix / XenSource

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Roger Baskerville has left Citrix, where he started out as the Sales Director of Xensource EMEA , after the Citrix merger to become Regional Director Northern Europe Server Virtualization .

During his years at Xensource Roger was one of the first commercial pushers of Xen and later XenEnterprise.

Roger has now joined Vizioncore as Vice President for EMEA and he will be responsible for EMEA operations. He leads the sales, marketing and systems engineering teams based across the region. Baskerville has held a variety of senior channel focused EMEA sales leadership positions with both mature high tech organizations as well as start-up operations. Previous companies include LightPointe, Palm, Compaq and NCR. A seasoned industry speaker who is both technically astute and sales focussed, Baskerville brings with him a wealth of experience in virtualization and international sales.

Earlier this year Quest fully acquired VizionCore as part of their journey into virtualization, after earlier
already owning a smaller part of the company. VizionCore then was described as the leading provider of disaster recovery and other products for virtual infrastructure management.

Today their website reads
“VizionCore Inc. provides software that helps organizations safeguard and optimize their virtualized environments and allows them to extract the maximum return on their investment in the VMware platform. Vizioncore’s software products support essential IT strategies, including business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery.”

With this move Roger stays in the Virtualization world where he has worked for the past couple of years, however moving from a fully Open Source based technology to a back to a proprietary environment.

The bigger question however is .. who else will be leaving Citrix/ XenSource. and when ? XenSource has been with Citrix for about a year now .. maybe there are other people jumping ship.

VMware Set To Slash Software Prices By 10%

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According to Microscope, VMware will slash its list price by 10% from Monday.  Matt Piercy, senior director of OEM alliances EMEA confirmed the price reduction.

This cancels out a 10% rise the virtualisation behemoth introduced on 1 September, which combined with the rallying of the US currency has made VMware less competitive, particularly against Microsoft, said partners.

…

Sources close to the vendor said VMware had not predicted the sweeping moves in the currencies at the time of the September price rise which was making its products appear to be around 20% more expensive.

Hat tip to Alessandro.

Cisco Ups Stake In VMware

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Cisco announced yesterday that it will acquire an increased equity stake in VMware.

Cisco will purchase 500,000 shares of VMware Class A common stock currently held by Intel for approximately $13.3M. Upon closing of the investment, Cisco will own approximately 1.7% percent of VMware’s total outstanding common stock.

Cisco’s purchase is intended to build on the strong inter-company collaboration between Cisco and VMware in the adoption of the companies’ virtualization products and solutions that address the intersection of virtualization and networking technologies.

In September, 2008, Cisco and VMware announced several joint initiatives in the data center virtualization market including the launch of the The Cisco Nexus® 1000V distributed virtual software switch, enhanced professional services and reseller certification training

Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition Focuses On Virtualization

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On Thursday, Ubuntu Linux distribution organization Canonical flipped the switch on free public downloads of Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition and Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition, both of which will be supported for 18 months.

Improvements to Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition focus on virtualization, Java development, system management, and email security. It includes a Virtual Machine builder with which developers can construct customized virtual images, which is based on the most recent version of the Just Enough Operating System (JeOS).

Java developers now have the option of using Apache Tomcat 6.0 and OpenJDK, and ClamAV and SpamAssassin have been added to the main repository to handle anti-spam and anti-virus tasks.

Earlier this week in a conference call with reporters, Mark Shuttleworth, leader of Ubuntu distribution organization Canonical, said the company has yet to turn a profit, but he plans to continue funding it for an additional three to five years.