Mark of technology

I’ve been doing allot of work with virtualisation products lately – primarily VMWare.  I’ve trained up as a VCP, and been doing allot of work talking to customers about Virtualisation.

In my area of work, I have to span across mainly small and medium sized business, with the occasional large business thrown in.  Virtualisation has been coming up allot from our more ‘plugged in’ customers, who keep their fingers on the pulse.  Why now though?  Well, there’s clearly allot of buzz around the technology at the moment – but there are many customers who feel that it’s therefore a ‘new’ technology that they haven’t really heard about before.

Whilst it’s true that the technology is now starting to ‘get serious’ in terms of making waves in more and more areas, the technology is certainly not new.  VMWare’s vSphere is a version 4 product; mature and well developed, with a whole suite of other applications that can be added to it to provide for specific needs.

Certainly, some of the competition is very much ‘version 1’ – Microsoft’s Hyper-V for example is clearly rather underdeveloped and not really the sort of thing we’d want to bet our, or indeed anyone else’s company on!  Microsoft will catch up, but right now what they lack in product, they are trying to make up for with marketing, talking loudly in as many places as possible about their offerings.

Ironically, they’re helping to raise VMWare’s profile – no customer can really consider Hyper-V without also seriously considering VMWare, and whilst Microsoft is winning some market share, many customers are coming to the conclusion that VMWare is simply the more mature, well established product out there.

Now of course, Microsoft are determined to keep plugging away at this, and it will likely force changes in the marketplace, and possibly changes in the way VMWare do business – but for now it’s clear that VMWare have an obvious advantage of being ‘old’ in a ‘new’ market.