newsmaker You have to hand it to Microsoft-— it knows how to make its mark on a market. The company understands that you don't have to be first in to win, and so it will be with virtualisation, according to one of the main Microsoft managers responsible for that technology, Zane Adam.
Adam, who is senior director for virtualization product management, believes Microsoft has the right strategy to grab a much larger share of virtualization sales, given that the company has, in his words, "probably the widest portfolio of virtualization products in the market today".
Adam believes that, together with Microsoft server software's ability to work with both virtual and physical machines, and the right price point, this puts the company in a good position to become the leader in the market.
Indeed, the right price point, as far as the company's hypervisor Hyper-V is concerned, is no charge at all. But the virtualization market continues to become more competitive: in September, Red Hat announced it would make its hypervisor free as well.
The competition also lies with VMware, the current market leader, and with Citrix, the owner of another popular hypervisor that it acquired when it bought XenSource last year.
There are many different strands to the virtualization market. Adam explained to ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK, Microsoft's strategy to bring them all together.
Q: Microsoft has announced a lot of virtualization products and initiatives over the past year. Isn't that creating some confusion?
Adam: On client virtualization, there are two big things: VDI [Virtual Desktop Infrastructure], our centralized desktop offering; and application virtualization, that we had for two years, [before] we re-named the product App-V. On the server side, we have all the emphasis on Hyper-V, and all the management investment, for physical and virtual management, through System Center.
We have probably the widest portfolio of virtualization products in the market today.
How do you see the virtualization market panning out? By which I mean, how does Microsoft get ahead in virtualization?
The core to being a major player and staying a major player requires [several] things.
Breadth of offering-—so not just one virtualization, but server, client and application [virtualization].
Next, in addition to breadth, the reach of the offering. Is the infrastructure around the client large enough? Now ours is pretty large, plus [we have] the name and the brand.
Then the third thing, how do you differentiate between the companies? The differentiator from a technology perspective is that we can manage both the virtual and the physical infrastructures through a single pane of glass.
No large company out there is 100 per cent virtualized. At Gartner and IDC, they will say that perhaps 12 percent of the servers out there are virtualized. The vast majority are not. The big question for managers has been: "How do I manage both the physical and virtual through a single pane of glass?".
We think that differentiator is in our System Center management product. That differentiates us from VMware, which is perhaps the largest [company] in the market today.
The next thing is democratizing the technology. The management stack that we sell, we sell at one-third the price of our competitors. We give them a more feature-rich feature set to manage, both physical and virtual. And then we got rid of complexity.
Our goal is to have mass adoption. So our goal is always to make the product affordable. By removing cost to the customers, you can give the flexibility to the customers, [and] it enables mass adoption.
So that is it. We have a large portfolio of products, and a combined physical-and-virtual infrastructure in one that is offered at [the right] price point.
VMware is the undisputed market leader in virtualization but, as a company, it came from nowhere to reach that position. Do you think Microsoft missed a trick there?
If you look at how we do investments, you know that we do not have to be the first in the market in anything. If you look at the server virtualization market-—the more mature side-—less than 12 percent of servers are virtualized. Eighty-eight percent are not. The market is still waiting to happen.
The model before we came in was high-priced and complex virtualized solutions. You were talking US$10,000 a server or US$3,000 a server. It's too expensive, so the market is 12 percent. Now by democratizing the market for virtualization-—by making Hyper-V free, managing the servers so physical and virtual are one and so on-—that, in our opinion, is a model for adoption of virtualization.
And we are seeing that. We have been in the market for 100 days, and we are already seeing large companies deploying our technology who in the past would have gone VMware. Choice is always good for customers. Competition. That is what we are bringing into the market.
And instead of playing 'my hypervisor vs VMware', we decided we're going to leapfrog VMware. The way we are going to leapfrog them is through our management solutions. So you can manage the physical and virtual infrastructure, instead of the old model, where you could manage just the virtual structure.
Our management products and our hypervisor are open, so that others can manage it and we can manage others. That way you get heterogeneous interoperability,[as opposed to] VMware's model, where they only manage themselves and keep it closed. Their customer value proposition is that once you have chosen VMware, you are stuck with VMware and you must pay the high prices of the vendor.
How is the partnership with Citrix-—which has its own virtualization offering, Xen-—working out?
They are a big part of our virtualization business. They have a technology that we would like: a connection broker. On the server side, [it's] the same thing, where Microsoft and XenSource are working together. We are doing things so our hypervisor can manage their systems, and vice versa.
We are going manage XenSource through our [System Center] Virtual Machine Manager down the road. And with the current, new version of Virtual Machine Manager, we are going to manage VMware.
Our partnership with Citrix has been decades long and is going to continue [to be] strong. With partners, it is a matter of Microsoft DNA. The ecosystem is what we work with. If you look at the client, if you look at the server, if you look at any aspect of our business, we are working with partners and building the industry together.
We work with the ecosystem of partners, and that is why we have hundreds of thousands of partners. That model doesn't change.
There has been much speculation that you will buy Citrix, primarily to get your hands on XenSource. That's not on the table?
I can't speculate on that. As a company, we look at things and we buy technology sometimes and we work with companies. We have been working with Citrix for more than 10 years. And we have a partnership.
And they are just a partner?
A very close partner. We have been working with Citrix for over a decade.
Do you think the emphasis on virtualization, which has been on the server so far, is beginning to switch more towards the client, which should be Microsoft's strong suit?
It is one of the big changes that is coming into IT. Not just client, not just server, but the way that data centers are going to be managed. Virtualization is going to be underpinning the whole foundation of technology.
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