Virtual Iron, a start-up trying to commercialize the open-source Xen virtualization software, has just gotten a new chief executive, and he wants to grab some of the attention lavished on rivals in the suddenly high-profile market.
The new CEO is Ed Walsh, who led Avamar Technologies, a company focusing on economizing storage by reducing duplicative data, which EMC acquired in 2004. John Thibault, who was named Virtual Iron's CEO in 2005, will remain executive chairman of the 73-employee Lowell, Mass.-based company, Virtual Iron plans to announce Monday.
Virtual Iron has been in the virtualization business for three years, getting started as Katana Technology with the idea that virtualization could let software be spread across multiple machines. That didn't work out, though, so the company shifted gears in 2006 to sell software that lets customers control software running on Xen.
Walsh knows he has his work cut out for him as he tries to give the company a higher profile. "Now's the time to put in a little sales and marketing and to hit the gas," he said.
To help that part of the business, Virtual Iron also has hired John McCarthy from EMC and McData to be senior vice president of sales.
Virtualization, which lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, is a hot area, but the heat lies mostly with market leader and EMC subsidiary VMware, which had a successful initial public offering in August, following up last week with $65 million in net income on revenue that grew 90 percent from the year-earlier quarter to $358 million.
Also in August, Citrix Systems announced a deal to acquire Xen's primary backer, XenSource, a move it completed last week.
Meanwhile, Virtual Iron will have to reckon with other start-ups, including Qumranet, and Microsoft plans to make its serious virtualization debut in about a year.
Walsh seems to have Microsoft and XenSource more in his competitive crosshairs than VMware. He recognizes that XenSource has better recognition as a provider of Xen-based virtualization, but believes Virtual Iron's product is stronger.
"They have great marketing. The project has to catch up with their marketing," Walsh said. Virtual Iron, he said, "is the polar opposite." And Microsoft, he said, "isn't even to the table yet."
Walsh does have a strategy to work around VMware's dominance: partnerships with software companies on whose toes VMware is stepping. "They're racing so hard to grow this, they're going to gore the oxen of a lot of the ecosystem," he said.
Citrix completed its $500 million acquisition of XenSource, the primary sponsor of the open-source Xen virtualization software, the company said Monday at its iForum conference in Las Vegas.
XenSource will become the core of the company's new virtualization and management division, and XenSource Chief Executive Peter Levine will report directly to Citrix CEO Mark Templeton. Xen co-founder Ian Pratt will continue to lead the Xen project and now is a Citrix employee, the company said.
Xen, like competing virtualization packages from companies including , SWsoft, Qumranet and Microsoft, lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously. The idea caught on initially as a way to consolidate the work of multiple inefficient servers, but now it's the foundation for more fluidly adaptable data centers that can respond to changing work demands or hardware failures. For that market, Citrix will sell a product now called Citrix XenServer, formerly known as XenEnterprise.
Citrix chiefly sells software that lets remote desktops or thin clients tap into desktop software actually running on a server. That approach dovetails neatly with virtualization as a way to run the desktop software on a server, and indeed Citrix said it will release its Citrix XenDesktop software in the first half of 2008. A free preview edition should be available for download on October 29 from the company's Web site, Citrix said.
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