Cameron Haight

Good comments by my colleague Tom Bittman on the recent Citrix and Microsoft news.  What’s interesting to me though is the now strategic emphasis on management technology by Citrix.  And of course Microsoft continues to invest in System Center and VMware in vCenter and other management add-ons.  As hypervisor platform commoditization grows, where will these vendors head?  Certainly one arc is management.  But the last time I checked there were some already (very) large players in this space.  Admittedly the activities of the “Big Four” (BMC, CA, HP and IBM) in the virtualization arena are still works-in-progress, but they (and other management suppliers) also see the opportunity. The virtualization providers and traditional management firms of course are all trying to find ways to work together, but how long will it be before everyone wants to own much of the same turf?  Like automation and workflow orchestration?  Or capacity planning (what we are now calling ITRP or IT Resource Planning at Gartner)? What about provisioning? There are multiple levels of these functions so large scale direct conflict is still likely in the future. But then we have to ask is this likely to repeat itself all over again in the cloud computing world? The potentially good news for management consumers is that as a result we may see not only lower costs, but maybe, just maybe, more innovation as a consequence of heightened competition.