Microsoft News Tracker

Today at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft Server and Tools CVP Bob Kelly, announced that the tardy SQL Server 2008 finally be available in August and added a hint about an upcoming "virtualization launch."

Kelly also said that on September 8, Microsoft plans to launch its "end-to-end virtualization stack" in an event for press and analysts.

"We’re taking virtualization deep into the infrastructure," Kelly said, noting that Microsoft plans to deliver virtualization capabilities to its server, desktop, application and presentation layer technologies. "Less than 10 percent of servers in the market today are acting as hosts for virtualization," he said. And Microsoft plans to have an impact on increasing that percentage. "We’re one-third the price of VMware," Kelly said.

It’s not clear exactly what Kelly is referring to since Microsoft’s top of the line Hyper-V is only $28 dollars with a purchase of Windows Server 2008, but I guess we’ll all find out in September.

The share price of VMware tanked yesterday when the virtualization software vendor and Microsoft competitor replaced its CEO, co-founder Diane Greene, with Paul Maritz, a former Microsoft executive:

VMware’s Board of Directors announced today that it has made a change in the leadership of the company with the departure of Diane Greene as President and CEO. VMware’s Board of Directors has appointed Paul Maritz as President and CEO of VMware effective immediately.
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Paul Maritz retired from Microsoft in 2000, after 14 years there. During this period Paul managed the development and marketing of many of the company’s major products, including such major releases as Windows 95, Windows NT, Database, Tools and Applications.

In 2003, Paul founded Pi Corporation, a startup software company focused on building Cloud-based solutions for new ways of doing personal information management. Pi Corporation was acquired by EMC in February 2008, and Paul became President of the EMC Cloud Division.

EMC owns 87% of VMware and EMC CEO Joe Tucci is the chairman of the VMware board so it is more precise to say that EMC replaced Greene. No one is formally offering any explanations for Greene’s departure, but a clue may lie in the earnings miss hinted at in the announcement:

VMware expects to announce earnings for the quarter ended June 30, 2008 as scheduled on July 22, 2008 at 2pm PDT. On that call Paul will make observations about the second half of 2008. While VMware is not updating guidance for Q2, we expect revenues for the full year of 2008 will be modestly below the previous guidance of 50% growth over 2007.

Still, nearly 50% revenue growth in today’s economic environment would be something that most boards of directors would be ecstatic about, which leads observers to suspect it was merely an excuse for Tucci to exercise his longstanding animosity towards Greene or to halt her intense lobbying for EMC to spinoff VMware.

Whatever the reason, VMware fired their very successful coach just as Microsoft’s Hyper-V team took the field which is hardly a winning game plan.

Update: Another theory - VMware’s CEO switch targeted at Microsoft, analysts say. The presumption is that Paul Maritz can handle competition with free and "good enough" better than Greene. Maybe, but it’s going to be tough for anyone. One interesting factoid:

Nine out of 10 guest operating systems that run on VMware are Windows servers, notes Burton Group analyst Richard Jones.

Today, Microsoft announced that Hyper-V, the virtualization hypervisor for Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing. Customers are supposed to be able to grab the final version at http://www.microsoft.com/Hyper-V, but that page doesn’t seem to have been updated just yet. Hyper-V will appear on Windows Update for Windows Server 2008 users starting July 8.

It’s been a long hard road to Hyper-V for Microsoft’s virtualization team what with schedule slips and feature cuts, but now they get to step into the ring with the heavyweights at VMware. Still, they have one big thing going for them: Hyper-V is effectively free so it may well draw the customers for whom it is “good enough.”

Microsoft created the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) in 2006 as a home for four acquired technologies including Softgrid’s application virtualization, but oddly delivered it only as a perk for System Assurance customers which as a rule are the larger enterprises. Apparently, Microsoft feels that the virtualization portion is the real draw and last week they announced that they are adding the desktop virtualization technologies they acquired with Kidaro and renaming MDOP as Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization:

We’ve invested over $400 million in developing and expanding MDOP thus far, and I’m very excited to share with you that we have officially finalized the acquisition of Kidaro Technologies, whose products enable a seamless combination of applications running from within both a host and guest OS. This technology will help enable end users to run applications from multiple versions of Windows at the same time, with seamless windowing and menus, and without the confusion of logging into and seeing multiple virtual machine desktops. The product teams are working closely with our new colleagues from Kidaro to incorporate the desktop virtualization technologies into MDOP in the first half of 2009, under the new product name Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization. We will continue investing here because we know manageability is fundamental to broad corporate use of desktop virtualization.

We’ve sold over 6.5 million licenses of MDOP to date, making it the fastest-selling volume licensing product in Microsoft history. It’s worth noting that 60 percent of IT Pros who are familiar with MDOP have told us they intend to deploy MDOP within the next 12 months.

While all this is undoubtedly a technological tour de force, one can’t help wonder if the advent of Web apps with better quality user interfaces obviates the need for elaborate virtualization lashups to run desktop applications from multiple managed PCs. Still, there are plenty of legacy Windows apps, particularly in large enterprises, where Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MEDV) may still be the way to go at least for a while.

Microsoft is never shy about reaching for the wallet to buy technology and the associated developer talent to embellish their offerings and this week’s shopping cart holds Rapt Inc,, an advertising yield software developer, and Kidaro, a provider of desktop virtualization management software.

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