The past two years have seen an arms race at the high end of the virtualization arena. The biggest players in the space have competed furiously to add features and capabilities to their combined platform offerings, either by swallowing up smaller companies or investing heavily in product development. MDM, DaaS, hybrid cloud, profile management, application virtualization, application publishing, cloud orchestration—the largest competitors in the virtualization space have either provided, or are looking to provide, these and many more features.
As the biggest companies try to provide the nirvana of an “everything-under-one-roof” end-to-end virtualization solution, a swarm of smaller players try to play catchup, aggressively growing their own product portfolios in a bid to keep their revenue streams maximized or to increase their own chances of acquisition by the larger beasts around them.
The Virtualization Arms Race
vSphere, Hyper-V, and XenServer are amongst the big hitters on the server virtualization level. In the desktop arena, Horizon 6 faces off against XenDesktop, Amazon WorkSpaces, and their ilk. App-V competes with ThinApp. Profile management tools abound, such as Microsoft UE-V, Citrix UPM, View Persona, and many more. XenMobile is positioned against Windows Intune and VMware’s freshly acquired AirWatch. The list of comparable technological features from the big vendors could go on and on. But this arms race isn’t simply confined to the virtualization tech titans—even smaller companies like AppSense and RES are expanding their product lines and software features quite aggressively. A case in point is enterprise file synchronization. It seems that today, a software suite isn’t complete without an enterprise file synchronization option.
