Returning, as I do, with a glistening wedding ring on my finger, I must now live up to my new status as a mature, upstanding, married member of the community. Losing my phone on honeymoon wasn't the best start but I'll put it down to teething problems.
When I (temporarily) signed off a couple of weeks ago, it was a matter of days before VMWorld and I was utterly convinced that Citrix would announce an acquisition of the leading HA and fault tolerance vendor Marathon. In the end it turned out not to be a full takeover but, almost as good, a tight OEM agreement, building Marathon's utterly brilliant technology (I saw this running a while back and was gobsmacked) into the synchronised release of XenServer v5.0.
It just goes to show that Citrix's claims of continued openness to partnership and upholding the DNA of industry co-operation that existed at XenSource before they were snapped up, do indeed ring very true. VMWare, as usual, have been developing their own HA solution, which will surely be hard-pushed to match the might of the XenServer/Marathon solution. HA with XenServer is now available in three flavours ("dialable" is the latest irritating IT buzzword for this):
1) automatic re-start of VMs (which VMWare have had for some time),
2) component level fault tolerance (e.g. a disk or network card goes down and Marathon moves everything across instantaneously to the back-up server with little to no impact), effective within a radius of about 50km - depending on the speed of the connection obviously,
3) global full system "five nines" availability providing as good as zero downtime (Marathon has a customer who have been running EverRun for 9 years and they have had just 11 seconds downtime in that period). This is available now for physical servers, Q1 09 in a virtual environment.
So my prognosis below that Citrix would upstage VMWare yet again wasn't quite borne out to the extent I had hoped but I still think there was almost as much coverage from VMWorld about them as there was VMWare.
Which leads me to another topic that hit the headlines whilst I was away. Apparently Citrix was to be bought by Microsoft. There have been several references to this, e.g. here, here and here, the latter of which led to two industry heavyweights, Brian Madden and Doug Brown, rather amusingly having a bit of a tiff about it, but, as we now know, it has all fizzled out to nothing. Again.
Microsoft buying Citrix must be one of the oldest rumours in the industry and it never seems to go away. Surely we must only ask ourselves the question why? What on earth would Microsoft get from buying Citrix? Sure, Citrix have better technology in most areas but would MS's shareholders really agree to a CapEx of what would probably amount to around 5-6 billion dollars for a slight improvement on what they already have? I doubt it, even if they do have pots of cash to spend.
And others? Brian even suggested VMWare as a potential suitor (and got completely lambasted for it in the responses - entirely unfairly in my opinion). Other names I've heard thrown into the hat are Symantec, IBM, Cisco, Google, Oracle and just about anyone else that could feasibly afford them.
Honestly? I think Citrix's stock is well down at the moment (just over $22 at the time of writing), as are many companies', so it would certainly be a reasonably good time to launch even a hostile takeover, however it's not the first time it's been down in the 20's and nothing happened the last few times. Perhaps the difference now is that, where Citrix were a delectable little canape a few years ago, they are rapidly becoming quite a mouthful these days. Their relentless attempts to establish themselves as an infrastructure player (alongside some of those names mentioned above) and an industry standard in application delivery and virtualisation has been quite a ride for us distributors. For this reason, I don't think they are anywhere near the finished article yet and I can't see a glaringly obvious candidate out there at the moment for whom they would provide a fully rounded, market-beating solution, even in an "embellishment" role. Not yet anyway.
Apparently, the next step on this journey is the "Cloud" - otherwise known as the Internet. (How on earth did we manage to re-brand the humble T'interweb and turn it into a new market area by the way?) Both VMWare and Citrix announced some cloudy stuff at VMWorld and I need to get my head around it before I blog with any authority on it, but I will say this. Mention applications and data in the same sentence as the word Internet to most security people and they will shudder. Never heard of TK Maxx, Marks & Spencer, British Military, [enter your favourite household name]?
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