Virtual Management Hype
There’s no doubt that the noise level surrounding the management of virtualization far exceeds the adoption of virtualization in production environments, but for all the hype surrounding new players pushing new paradigms, there is one serious obstacle.
The amount of inertia attached to existing system management platforms is immense, which means that the vast majority of customers are going to extremely reticent about junking their existing investments in system management tools from Altiris, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and CA in favor of newfangled tools from startup companies such as Cassatt or tools created by the VMware division of EMC.
Despite hype in the form of cover stories in Forbes featuring Cassatt CEO Bill Coleman, companies such as Altiris are already working on adding support for virtualization within customers’ existing system management tools. And because Altiris, for example, already has strong relationships with Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Intel along with a pretty loyal customer base, usurping those companies is going to prove to be an incredibly difficult challenge from both a sales and marketing perspective.
And if they can’t pull that off, this means that all the companies in the virtualization game today have pretty limited growth potential, because as virtualization technology continues to get embedded in the processor and the operating system, you can’t help but wonder what value companies such as VMware and Cassatt will be able to add downstream.
We know that both companies think that their singular focus on virtualization will carry the day for them, but there are lots of areas in computing, such as database applications, where virtualization doesn’t make a whole lot of sense yet. Furthermore, given the cheap price of hardware, a lot of customers are turned off by the complexity of managing virtualization, so they eschew the technology all together. In either event, this means that there will be a range of virtualized and non-virtualized systems across just about every enterprise for years to come, and that makes the likelihood that customers will want two or more separate management systems to manage those distinct environments a pretty remote probability when their existing systems can be extended to manage both environments well enough.
