wisdom: November 2009

Star Wars: Six key vendor battles in the future

Battles between technology firms are never ending. If one ends, another begins. They invoke interest, create new jargons, and most importantly end in improving the products. Yes, battles are good, especially when they involve the who’s who. Unified Communication Cisco vs Micrsoft vs Polycom vs Avaya Who wouldn’t want to be part of a thriving market? Unified communications, once a sole playground of Cisco, is now a hot target market for many. Competition is getting tougher for the networking giant in the UC space as companies like Microsoft and Avaya roll up their sleeves. Microsoft and Cisco in fact compete and collaborate in this market. To be precise, their relationship can be called ‘co-opetition’. The story goes back to 2006, when Microsoft and Nortel formed the Innovative Communications Alliance. But after Nortel went bankrupt and ICA died, Microsoft went straight ahead and formed a UC alliance with HP -- Cisco’s networking and datacenter rival and in the process burning its bridges in a serious way. While Microsoft and Cisco would definitely make for a watch-worthy game, UC and collaboration is the very raison d’etre for a company like Avaya. The competition between Cisco and Avaya, thus, is more serious. The most recent battlefield for the firms is tablet computers tailored specifically for enterprise collaboration and UC. With the acquisition of Tanberg, Cisco is also competing directly with Polycom in the low-end and mid-range enterprise videoconferencing. Polycom, in turn, aligned itself with Cisco rivals IBM and Juniper to drive sales of its own videoconferencing systems along with IBM servers and storage systems and Juniper routers. With competition raving gradually, UC is going to be an interesting space to keep an eye on. Battle for the Cloud Microsoft Vs Red Hat The cloud battlefield is a bit confusing as there are too many rivals who are not sure of who they are fighting with and for what. But there are two clear contenders who stand-out from the rest of the crowd -- Microsoft and Red Hat. In Red Hat’s own words -- There are only two companies that can provide a stack of cloud-enabled enterprise software, Red Hat and Microsoft. And the former is positioning its Cloud Foundations as an open source alternative to Microsoft’s Azure platform. While Microsoft claims that it has designed Windows Azure grounds up to be the most open cloud platform available today, Red Hat begs to differ. It argues that Windows Azure requires that customers rewrite applications to use APIs that are specific to Microsoft’s hosted Azure service or large hosted services at a small number of Microsoft hosting partners. Red Hat, by contrast, enables customers to run applications written in their choice of language and framework across physical servers, virtualized environments, and private and public clouds, clarifies the vendor. It has also gone one step further and submitted its cloud platform as a potential standard for interoperability. However, whether the open mantra alone will assure a happy ending for Red Hat is something that we need to wait and see. And discount Microsoft’s marketing potential at your own peril. Datacenter HP vs IBM vs Cisco Competition in the datacenter space has been heating up for quite some time now and in the process many old friends have turned foes. Though the market was always competitive, one entry has definitely upset the apple cart. Cisco entered the server market with its ‘Unified Computing System’ in 2009 and started competing with its long-standing partners like HP and IBM. Though Cisco CEO John Chambers made it clear that the company would ‘focus not on competition, but where the market is going’, its move has definitely raised a few eyebrows in the industry. However, what it also did was to accelerate the industry’s move towards the concept of a converged infrastructure -- of offering everything that goes into a datacenter instead offering bits and pieces. As a knee-jerk reaction to Cisco’s UC architecture, HP launched its computing system named BladeSystem Matrix, exactly within a month. Though the vendor claimed that its architecture is completely a different concept from that of Cisco, the intention behind the launch seemed to be no different -- to be the leader in the fast and ever-growing data center market. On the other side, IBM has made its move by getting very close to Cisco rivals Juniper and Brocade. IBM is OEMing switches and routers from both these companies and is trying to keep a safe distance from Cisco at every possible occasion. HP, on the other hand, refused to even acknowledge Cisco as a competitor. But who would emerge as a winner seems to be a tough thing to predict. Virtual Reality VMware vs Citrix The rivalry between Citrix and VMware in the virtualization space is not new for anybody. Over the years, it has been getting tougher and at the same time newer. Both the companies have been fighting over new topics every time. It started with VMware clearly becoming the leader in the server virtualization space with numbers that were way ahead of that of Citrix. At that stage, it clearly was one-horse race. However, as Citrix and Microsoft teamed up, things started changing. It was then Citrix’s turn to top VMware in the desktop virtualization market. The former clearly had a lead in this space, though VMware badly tried to pull alongside. While Citrix claimed to have technical superiority in the desktop virtualization, VMware came back with a ‘we invented VDI’ story. The battle between the two has now moved to a different level -- to the cloud. Though VMware seems to be more aggressive about pushing its ‘virtualization as a path to cloud’ story to customers, Citrix seems to be equally excited about its Cloud App Delivery. The role that these two companies will play in accelerating the cloud adoption is definitely going to be worth a watch.

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Sunday, November 22, 2009

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