John
09-02-2009, 08:39 AM
Senior management at VMware have indicated that if Microsoft wishes to take them on in the virtualisation sphere then the company is ready for a fight.
VMware's chief executive Paul Maritz, speaking at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco, was blunt in his assessment of the challenge from Microsoft and how he intended to beat it.
Obviously Microsoft is a serious competitor, he said.
The fact is virtualisation is not easy to do and it takes significant effort. Microsoft has been working in Hyper-V for five years and they are at a stage we are at three years ago. The way you deal with competitors is by producing a better value than they do.
Microsoft has been seriously worried by the success of VMware. Last year it released its Hyper-V virtualisation software ahead of schedule and massively undercut the price of VMware's package.
It was also a sponsor of last year's VMworld conference, but his year was barred from doing so as VMware considered it a serious competitor. Analysts agree.
Maritz is well versed in Microsoft's competitive tactics. He spent 14 years at the company and played a key role in the development of Windows and Internet Explorer.
VMware is arguing that Microsoft came to the virtualisation field too late and is too tied to the principle that the operating system is the binding force behind visualised computing.
That's been a historic Microsoft strategy and in this case it works very clearly against customer interests because by definition it constrains the solution to be a very narrow partitioning solution that you add on to Windows as opposed to a datacentre solution. That's why we think that solution is flawed from the get-go, VMware vice president of server business Raghu Raghuram told V3.co.uk.
The other interesting aspect of this is that every security vulnerability that affects the Microsoft operating system by implication will require you to look at your Hyper-V environment to see if there is impact as opposed to an operating system-independent solution.
VMware's chief executive Paul Maritz, speaking at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco, was blunt in his assessment of the challenge from Microsoft and how he intended to beat it.
Obviously Microsoft is a serious competitor, he said.
The fact is virtualisation is not easy to do and it takes significant effort. Microsoft has been working in Hyper-V for five years and they are at a stage we are at three years ago. The way you deal with competitors is by producing a better value than they do.
Microsoft has been seriously worried by the success of VMware. Last year it released its Hyper-V virtualisation software ahead of schedule and massively undercut the price of VMware's package.
It was also a sponsor of last year's VMworld conference, but his year was barred from doing so as VMware considered it a serious competitor. Analysts agree.
Maritz is well versed in Microsoft's competitive tactics. He spent 14 years at the company and played a key role in the development of Windows and Internet Explorer.
VMware is arguing that Microsoft came to the virtualisation field too late and is too tied to the principle that the operating system is the binding force behind visualised computing.
That's been a historic Microsoft strategy and in this case it works very clearly against customer interests because by definition it constrains the solution to be a very narrow partitioning solution that you add on to Windows as opposed to a datacentre solution. That's why we think that solution is flawed from the get-go, VMware vice president of server business Raghu Raghuram told V3.co.uk.
The other interesting aspect of this is that every security vulnerability that affects the Microsoft operating system by implication will require you to look at your Hyper-V environment to see if there is impact as opposed to an operating system-independent solution.