Does VMware Have a Real Future

VMware has dominated the virtualization market ever since that market came into being. It has done so the old-fashioned way: by offering good software and support. What could go wrong Well, price is a big weakness when every player in the market, VMware included, is either offering a free virtualization program or baking one into their operating systems. It's hard to compete with free.

Though VMware provides its low-end offerings for free, it can't stay in the game by relying on those alone; it makes its money exclusively from selling high-end virtualization and virtualization management software. Unlike its competitors, VMware doesn't have much of a revenue stream from operating systems and other products. And when it attempted to overcome that weakness, it was blindsided. More on that in a bit.

VMware's biggest problem is one that has laid other companies low: MicrosoftMicrosoft. Slowly but surely, Microsoft's Hyper-V has been making gains against VMware's ESX . Gartner projects that in 2012, Hyper-V will account for 27% of the market, up from 11% two years ago. Within that projected 27%, Gartner says Microsoft will take 85% of all small businesses that use virtual servers. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

On top of that, Windows 8 Server boasts a greatly improved version of Hyper-V. Enterprise customers who believe they can't go wrong buying Microsoft are going to start asking why they need VMware as they move to Windows 8 Server.

But Microsoft isn't the whole story, not even when you throw its buddy Citrix, with XenServer, into the mix. Multiple big IT vendors, including IBMIBM, Hewlett-Packard, BMC Software, Intel and Red Hat, have banded together in the Open Virtualization Alliance to promote an open-source virtualization platform -- Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) -- as an alternative to VMware. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de