vmware

A partnership that includes Microsoft and Apple agreed to modify the terms of its acquisition of some Novell patents in order to satisfy antitrust regulators worried about the impact on open-source software.

The Department of Justice announced today that CPTN Holdings altered the original agreement, requiring that it license rather than buy some of the 882 patents and patent applications. And all of the patents that are purchased will be bought under the GNU General Public License and the Open Invention Network License, according to the agency, which worked closely with Germany's Federal Cartel Office.

Microsoft established CPTN, which … Read more

Tintri this week is coming out of stealth mode with a new storage system designed to solve the unique storage problems of virtual machines (VMs). Founded by the former head of VMware R&D, the company is also announcing it raised $17 million from venture firms NEA and Lightspeed Partners.

Storage has long been a lucrative market, heavily dominated by just a few players. The introduction of a virtualization-oriented solution brings new blood and a new approach to a rather stagnant industry. And, considering the enormous growth of virtualization, an approach that IT staff should certainly be interested in. … Read more

Retail giant Target plans to roll out Microsoft's virtualization technology to its 1,700 stores, giving the software giant's enterprise cloud computing efforts a new boost. Microsoft announced a new deal in which Target will manage such operations as inventory, point-of-sale, and supply-chain management remotely with Microsoft's Hyper-v software. In addition, Target will roll out 15,000 virtual machines using the technology across the country.

VMware, run by former Microsoft senior executive Paul Maritz, dominates the software virtualization business. But Microsoft has been working to cut into that lead with acquisitions and new software. The market offers … Read more

Zynga tries to trademark the use of -ville as a suffix in everything from games (including the games it shamelessly ripped off) to clothing stores. Won't someone stop the madness? Please? Also, Goldman Sachs states from its highly compromised position that Facebook could be a credible threat to Netflix, and credulous reporters and shareholders eat it up. Plus, HP makes a SERIOUS move: putting WebOS on all new PCs. --Molly

iPad corporate users can directly access and control their Windows PCs from their tablets through a new app from VMware.

Launched in Apple's App Store today, the free VMware View app for the iPad is designed for business users who want to be able to access their own office PCs or PCs set up in their company's data center through their tablets. The app can run over a Wi-Fi or 3G connection, allowing people to connect either in or out of the office.

In a blog posted today, VMware said that iPad users can use the tablet's … Read more

VMware is moving upstream in the software stack into IT operations management.

The company today rolled out VMware VCenter Operations, which will aim to integrate computing assets, capacity and configurations. Analytics will help automate virtualized data center infrastructure.

The backdrop is that VMware is increasingly moving up the data center stack. As the hypervisor market becomes commoditized, VMware is aiming higher. First, VMware rolled out the VSphere cloud operating system. And now the company is looking to IT management software.

Read more of "VMware launches vCenter Operation, eyes bigger piece of data center pie" at ZDNet's Between … Read more

The big industry event about virtualization is VMworld, usually held in late Summer / early Fall. You don't have to wait for VMware's conference, however, to find yourself in VM World. We now live in it, every day.

It's really quite amazing how quickly virtualization has swept through, and become ensconced in, IT. Data centers have--for decades--been famously conservative when it comes to introducing changes that might threaten to disrupt production applications. For years, whenever we'd ask operationally focused IT managers about introducing new control software--for workload management, service provisioning, automated orchestration, and so on--we always heard … Read more

As virtualization and cloud-computing trends continue to see growth, VMWare has also seen growth.

For its fourth quarter, VMWare reported net income of $198 million, or 46 cents per share, up from 31 cents in the same quarter a year ago. Revenue was $836 million, a 37 percent increase. Wall Street had been expecting earnings of 44 cents per share on revenue of $803.8 million. (Statement)

In a statement, President and CEO Paul Maritz said:

VMware clearly benefited in the fourth quarter from both an uptick in spending and the momentum of virtualization as the central technology for modernizing … Read more

In part 1 of this two-part series, I highlighted my thoughts on why the long-term future of the cloud, at least for consumer and small business, belongs to integrated "one-stop" cloud suites, and why Microsoft and Google are the two companies best positioned for this opportunity. However, I was also clear that success in this space for both companies is far from guaranteed.

The truth is that several potential competitors could overtake either--or both--companies, if they should fail to execute successfully. Here are some of my favorites, and a few that should be contenders but really aren't, … Read more