There is an interesting article regarding VMWare’s battle to hold market share in the hypervisor market in Network World, “VMware plows ahead in face of controversy, increased competition”.
The article discusses a survey showing VMWare and Microsoft with very close hypervisor penetration! However, they point out that VMWare is used by 100% of the Fortune 100 and 150,000 companies worldwide. VMWare does seem to have the majority of clients and is very strong in enterprise clients.
This will be a very interesting year for the “Hypervisor Battle”. Microsoft has commoditized the hypervisor by bundling it with Windows Server 2008. Microsoft is taking share and starting in the mid-market clients. They are offering to manage both Microsoft Hyper-V and V-Sphere with System Center Virtual Machine Manager as they recognize that they will need to co-exist with VMWare.
Microsoft has been successful at taking down some large competitors and continues to battle with many. One thing for sure is that Microsoft will stay in the battle and will not give up easy – as Steve Ballmer said at Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference 2009: “long term, long term, long term…. Is Microsoft going to go home? We don’t go home!”
Network World Article – “VMware plows ahead in face of controversy, increased competition”:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/082609-vmware-vmworld-preview.html?hpg1=bn