HP's news today that it would expand its partnership with VMware to include deeper technology integrations and future product development could send the competition scrambling to acquire virtual systems management capabilities.
"This deal is hot and it's the first of its kind that involves a major management vendor doing R&D and development work with VMware," says Evelyn Hubbert, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. "They need to deliver a product road map to prove there is substance behind this partnership."
Not only does the deal give HP access to information about VMware technology, it paves the way for the management vendor to also ink deals with hypervisor competitors Microsoft and Citrix to ultimately offer heterogeneous virtual server management. Fow now, the market might not be demanding such multi-platform capabilities, but industry watchers argue that time will come. And the vendor with the deepest virtual system management skills -- across performance, availability, capacity, configuration, patching and more -- could come out ahead of the pack.
Gartner research data has showed that one of the main reasons customers choose VMware is the management technology. And the hypervisor vendor has acquired management capabilities with Akimbi, Dunes Technologies and most recently B-hive Networks.
"VMware is rapidly building out a management tool set," said Cameron Haight, a research vice president at Gartner during a presentation at HP Software Universe in Las Vegas.
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