Just read a post by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of eweek titled 'Is VMware a dead duck?'. I assume that article was not meant seriously, but in deed last week Vmware shares went down on the announcement that Oracle had 'entered' the virtualisation business. As if VMware with a technology lead from here to the moon and 95% plus market share, should have anything to worry about??
Oracle makes databases and knows nothing about virtualization. VMware on the other hand, has been doing virtualisation for more then 10 years and has fought off attacks on its core market succesfully. Microsoft's attempts have been pathetic (centered around its purchase of Connectix, a second rate technology it bought cheaply years back). Citrix just flushed $500 million down the toilet buying Xen Source (at least it knows its plumbing is OK). Well I'm off to buy some more VMware shares whilst they are still cheap (relatively)......
4 comments:
One of the points he makes in the article is the open-source "edge" and how it will affect the VMware market. 3CX is up against open-source Asterisk, sipXpbx and others. I see you have plans to port to Linux in 2008 so what is your edge over them?
I hope you did not buy any VMware shares that day. It dropped from $110 to $80 a share in 20 days. Don't get me wrong, I believe VMware has a great product line and potential, but buying land in Cyprus is a better bet now days the way the stock market seems to be going. Regards, Filios
Good point. Well, first of all i dont see open source affecting Vmware or 3CX much for that matter. Fact is, that this kind of technology requires extensive, long term investment (virtualization and telephony). Most open source projects run out of steam at some point in time and stop innovating.
Re VMware shares: You're probably right, though considering their market share and technology, i still think its a good bet...
I will be busy covering our little island with VMware in the meantime :)
Well I disagree in part... :-) Remember back in the early nineties when Microsoft decided to jump into the network OS space that was dominated by Novell, with pretty much the same market share as VMWare holds now on the virtualization space? Well MS did not know anything about NOS. Fast forward 15 years and Novell is dead and more than that, Microsoft has a huge market share in the NOS space. Probably all 500 Fortune 500 companies run many critical services on top of Windows Server.
VMWare became arrogant and stuborn as Novell did. With money to spare and time, I am sure some heavy weight like Microsoft and Oracle will be able to wipe out VMWare like it happened with Novell. The only difference is VMWare can look back and learn from Novell's mistakes to avoid that happening now. But given the way they are dealing with customers and market these days I do not see a bright future for them.
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