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Stacking the deck
Last week, the recent wave of ver- tical integration among enterprise IT vendors appeared headed for another crest: There were reports
in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that
Novell is preparing to split itself in two, selling its SUSE Linux operations to a strategic
buyer and the balance of its properties to a
private equity investor.
While it’s easy to get carried way thinking
about the potential synergies that major acquisitions might bring, for enterprise IT customers,
the sort of vertical integration that Oracle and
VMware have pursued must be greeted with
some measure of concern. With consolidation
comes the specter of reduced competition and,
potentially, loss of focus, as large organizations
work to digest their acquisitions.
The most likely suitor for SUSE Linux appears
to be VMware, which has been busily amassing
middleware and application acquisitions such as
Jason
Brooks
Zimbra and SpringSource to layer on top of its
virtualization stack. While the rumor that some
tech titan might add an enterprise Linux distribution to its holdings is always within earshot,
a VMware/SUSE pairing
makes particular sense.
With regard to a potential VMware/SUSE
matchup, the good news for enterprises is
that the virtualization, operating system and
middleware layers in play are matched with a
certain amount of standardization, which is bolstered in places by solid open-source reference
implementations. This standardization promises
to preserve play among
the layers, and make the
specter of vertical integration less ominous.
‘VMWARE HAS COZIED UP TO SUSE, WITH DEALS AROUND BUNDLING SUSE LINUX WITH VSPHERE.’
Despite its stack-building
effor ts, VMware has been
without an operating system
layer. But in recent months,
VMware has cozied up to
SUSE, with deals around
bundling SUSE Linux with
vSphere and building virtual appliances atop Novell’s
Linux platform.
More than just adding new product pieces,
a SUSE pickup would leave VMware better
equipped to compete with and interoperate
with its chief virtualization rivals. Novell’s SUSE
virtualization solutions are based on Xen, which
powers the products of Citrix, Amazon, Oracle
and others; SUSE’s engineers are no strangers
to the KVM and libvirt technologies that drive
Red Hat’s virtualization products; and SUSE has
maintained a considerable effort around interoperability with Microsoft’s Hyper-V products.
If Novell’s SUSE holdings include its open-source .NET implementation, Mono, that piece
could provide an additional plank in VMware’s
competitive platform.
This dynamic, whereby
vertical integration exists
alongside enough standardization to allow customers to choose among the
layers, is reflected in this
week’s cover story. In it,
Wayne Rash examines the
ways in which enterprises
are achieving unified communications success without swallowing entire
unified product stacks from their UC providers.
As with the stack layers in play in a potential VMware/SUSE matchup, standardization
and a demand for interoperability in the UC
landscape work as a balance against vendor
inclinations to differentiate themselves into
silos. Of course, neither product space is an
interoperability nirvana, but offerings from each
class are delivering real results for customers,
and that’s what’s most important. ´
e WEEK Labs Editor in Chief Jason Brooks
can be reached at jbrooks@eweek.com.
