Mitchell Bingemann | August 12, 2008
RED Hat and Microsoft are poised to drive greater enterprise penetration of virtualisation while VMware sits on the sidelines as a bit player, long-serving Red Hat executive Paul Cormier says.
Despite VMware's dominance in virtualisation Red Hat products and technologies president Paul Cormier says the virtualisation software company's lack of experience in the operating system space will cause its market share to dwindle in coming years.Describing virtualisation as "the next-generation operating system", Cormier says Red Hat and Microsoft are in a better position than VMware to drive widespread adoption of the technology.
"Virtualisation is all about how applications interface with the operating system. This is one thing that Microsoft agrees 100 per cent with us on.
"We are in a unique position because we are strong in virtualisation and we are strong in the operating system area with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
"We and Microsoft we are the only two vendors with all the pieces together for a full virtualisation system."
Cormier says trend towards hypervisor technology without a partnered operating system leaves a gap.
Hypervisor is a virtualisation platform that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer simultaneously.
"Many other vendors are putting hypervisors in the market by themselves without the operating system. That's like having just a mousepad and no mouse - there's not much you can do with it," Cormier says. "To some extent that's what VMware is.
"VMware has some great management systems but their lack of an operating system is an Achilles heel."