VMware is a high quality franchise and a leader in the important virtualization space. Last quarter’s acquisition of Nicira expands VMware’s addressable market by adding a key asset in the software-defined networking space – a complementary addition to VMware’s software defined data center offering. VMware management has shown great product vision in the vSphere server virtualization market and now is attempting to extend this to the next generation of what they refer to as the software defined data center and cloud infrastructure management products that VMware has been adding to its product portfolio.
VMware launched its vCloud suite using technology from its acquisition of Dynamic Ops, which received some customer success in Q4 deals, including stand alone and as part of the Suite. This product is a core offering as the company now focuses on the market for private cloud solutions and Software Defined Data Center. The ability to manage non-vSphere platforms in a play to be more broadly appealing in managing IT services across heterogeneous hypervisors and Amazon Web Services.
Microsoft Competition for VMWare
Microsoft having released an updated version of the company’s Hyper-V solution in the September quarter as part of its Server 2012 suite with expanded functionality and low pricing. With majority of the workloads virtualized to date being Microsoft Windows Server based applications, Hyper-V is now better positioned competitively, but VMware has already become a standard in may IT shops and is now moving strategically beyond server virtualization to a much more ambitious effort to modernize the data center.
Pricing could be more the issue with Microsoft’s new, more fully functional Hyper-V product now available, but as the market is moving up to virtualize higher-end Tier 1 applications, this may favor VMware and also tend to pull along a greater attach of management tools.