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.”

Today Microsoft is cranking up the hoopla for the 2008 refresh of their mainline server and tools products: Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008. Visual Studio 2008 is already generally available and SQL Server 2008 won’t ship until 3Q, but some there is some claim to relevancy for the launch event beyond the marketing hype since Windows Server 2008 became generally available today.

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Microsoft is holding a private Virtualization Deployment Summit today and tomorrow for Microsoft customers and partners. An uncharitable view is that it is all fancy footwork to distract from the late and featured reduced Hyper-V (formerly Viridian), but there was some interesting news including the acquisition of Calista Technologies.

Microsoft has completed the acquisition of Calista Technologies, a leading provider of graphics technologies for next-generation desktop and presentation virtualization solutions. Calista software improves the user experience of 3-D and multimedia delivery for Microsoft multimedia applications, virtualized desktop deployments, and server-hosted virtualized desktops or applications using Windows Server Terminal Services.

Microsoft also finally backed off on the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) prohibition of the virtualization of Home Versions of Windows Vista which had caused adverse comment when it was revealed last year and was clearly an annoyance for developers (not to mention Mac users) although Microsoft had claimed security risks. Those concerns have apparently been allayed.

Finally, Microsoft renewed their vows with satellite Citrix, the long time provider of Microsoft-based thin client solutions and proud new owner of XenSource, and promised a new virtualization marketing push based on Windows Server 2008.