Virtualization Is Crowded
I follow the market that VMWare dominates because I think that virtualization of the x86 processor is a significant achievement of mankind. Faking out operating systems to make them believe that physical hardware exists is just really, really cool.
Whenever I ask myself if something is technically possible through software engineering efforts, I have to remind myself that mankind has virtualized the x86 processor and thus anything is possible.
Just like any other contribution to mankind, virtualization has become a commodity over time. Microsoft and VMWare now offer some such products for free, marking what I think is a trend towards enterprise competition in the attention economy. Symantec/Veritas just announced a free version of its highly popular Storage Foundation product. I don’t forsee a day anytime soon where enterprise data center software will be monetized through advertising, but near-term possiblity of end-users seeing advertising in exchange for collaboration software for example is another possibility entirely.
XenSource further solidifies the commodity status of the market with its open source offerings. Though technical differences exist between the vendors as to whether an OS is completely isolated or just partially virtualized, the end result is very similar: hardware resources are more efficiently managed when multiple operating systems share resources.
There’s also Virtuozzo and moka5, another new entrant to the space. Which brings me to my point: do we really need another virtualization vendor when the technology is so freely accessible? And what type of exit can a VC expect to make in such a saturated market? EMC acquired VMWare only after watching Veritas fumble what was setup to be a perfect alley oop, but not before a bidding war broke out with Microsoft.
But there’s very little public information on moka5 and there are some extremely smart people running the company and backing them financially, namely Vinod Khosla. I’ll eagerly await information to find out what differentiates them from the rest of the pack and hopefully it will be something more than just a few incremental features.