Quoting Australian IT
IN VMware's brave new world, software applications will no longer sit on top of operating systems but will be bundled and sold as software appliances.
They will sit above a layer of software developed by VMware, a company founded in 1998 by Diane Greene and her husband Mendel Rosenblum.
VMware's software lets clients run multiple copies of the same or different operating systems on the one server, increasing its processing power and allowing customers to reduce the number of physical servers they run.
At the core of VMware is its virtualisation technology, called a hypervisor, which is a layer of software sitting between the operating system and the server's hardware that automatically handles how the software uses server resources.
The software appliance model removes responsibility from the user for operating system patches and upgrades and hands it to the application developer.
Speaking at VMware's annual conference in Los Angeles earlier this month, Ms Greene, who is company president, said the model was a natural extension of the company's strategy of transforming data centres with virtualisation technology.
"We really put it out there at this conference, and I'm looking forward to seeing where people are in six months," she said.
"We've believed from day one that this virtualisation software will be on every machine."
The model is expected to appeal to customers who do not have resources to devote to managing IT infrastructure.
VMware has 330 software appliances in its online virtual application marketplace.
Many of the virtual appliances were created by small software companies and based on open-source operating systems. Tony Iams, US vice-president and senior analyst of Australian research company Ideas International, said lines between operating systems and an applications would continue to blur.
Licensing costs would restrict appliance development to Linux-based applications, which would slow down its adoption, he said.
"Most of these are going to be applications that are focused on infrastructure and tools," Mr Iams said.
"There are some clear cases where this makes sense, such as security, but there is a whole group of applications where this does not make as much sense."
Ms Greene said the appliance idea itself was not new and several companies had tried to develop such models, including an ill-fated attempt in the late 1990s by Sun Microsystems and Oracle to package their technologies as a closed unit.
VMware grew by 86 per cent for its third quarter of 2006, reporting revenue of $189 million putting it on track to report full-year revenue of more than $US1 billion ($1.28 billion).
By contrast, parent company EMC reported growth of only 19 per cent for the same quarter, but on a much larger revenue figure of $2.82 billion.
The rising popularity of VMware was reflected in its conference attendance, which nearly doubled to 7000 people this year.
At present VMware faces limited competition from an open-source project called Xen but Microsoft has indicated it will develop virtualisation technology to compete more directly with VMware.
Microsoft is not expected to release its own hypervisor product until 2008, but it was looming as the greatest threat to VMware's success, Mr Iams said.
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