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- » GigaOM Interview: Citrix CTO Simon Crosby on Xen, Microsoft & VMware
Virtualization underpins cloud computing by making it possible to separate the software from the hardware. So far the dominant player has been VMware, with about 95 percent of the market, but Simon Crosby, CTO of Citirix and former CTO of open source virtualization company XenSource (which Citrix acquired last year), plans to take that market back. The launch of Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor is part of of his strategy. The rest revolves around services that “play nicely with others,” and free hypervisors embedded into servers and operating systems.GigaOM: Can you tell me how the launch of Hyper-V affects Citrix Xen products?Crosby: Our key founding philosophy was fast, free, compatible and ubiquitous hypervisors. Microsoft’s Hyper-V which is compatible with XenServer, is alright when it comes to being fast; it’s 28 bucks, so close to free; and because it’s Microsoft it will be ubiquitous. So for us, it’s good. The problem is it took them too darn long to get it out. Working with Microsoft has been a little bit like having a ring through the nose of the bull. We have a rope tied to that ring because we’re ahead of them on this thing, but when they charge I’m going to get out the way and point them at VMware. GigaOM: But will Hyper-V compete with the Citrix server virtualization business anyway?Crosby: You should look forward to interesting announcements of products to add value to Hyper-V. We’re going to sell into that footprint much like Citrix has always extended the use cases of Microsoft products.GigaOM: What about VMware?Crosby: We only have a 4 percent or 5 percent share in this market, and the market is significantly overpaying for what they have today, so it’s a very, very interesting time. We’re going to track VMware down with the fast, free, compatible and ubiquitous hypervisor and sell on top of that. We’ve accepted that hypervisors are not the stuff you can charge for. It has taken longer than I thought to get there, and customers have yet to decide, too, if the hypervisors are part of the box or in the operating system. We’ll be wherever we can to create for ourselves the largest possible upsell with other products.GigaOM: So we’re early on in this game?Crosby: Virtualization is reorganizing the IT industry. Separating the software from hardware allows more services oriented on the software stack. It creates this huge power vacuum in the industry, and everyone is rushing to fill it. Virtualization becomes a tool for differentiation for a former commodity box maker. Look at our deal with Symantec and its Veritas products. That’s a profoundly important play because, in the enterprise, what you’re about to see is companies entering the virtualization market with a commodity hypervisor and a clear intent to upsell the products.GigaOM: What will virtualization mean for storage?Crosby: With Xen, multiple servers will automatically pool, and from these resource pools customers get dynamism and availability. VMware turns the storage industry into a dumb block of boxes, while we have a storage model that allows us to leverage our software to the let the storage infrastructure participate in the value chain, and the storage industry works with us very closely. Microsoft is completely missing from storage.GigaOM: What about desktop virtualization? Unlike the server side, you guys have a lot of competition ready to pounce.Crosby: Yes, and that opportunity is of great interest to both of us. Arguably the remote delivery of apps is what we have been doing for 18 years at Citrix. We have always cared about the line of sight between an app in the data center and the desktop. We’re very confident and have opened up the category, but everyone and their dog are in there too. We’re watching 10 to 12 other offerings, but we just see a lot of smoke and not a lot of fire.GigaOM: After storage, where is virtualization heading next? Crosby: There’s a lot happening with I/O virtualization and the creation of these fabrics for information flow. Fibre Channel won’t roll over and die, but some of the Ethernet stuff is really interesting. Backing away this thing that has always been proprietary presents interesting opportunities. When you virtualize the resources of a single compute memory you create a new type of system where Xen is the virtualization engine, because it’s not proprietary.GigaOM: So you’re describing a cloud?Crosby: To the extent that the clouds are relevant, the largest virtualization effort is Amazon Web Services. Xen will be in every cloud. The only cloud that it won’t be in is Microsoft’s and that will be running Hyper-V. So that’s an interesting path as clouds become an opportunity for some IT functions to be outsourced.
- » Microsoft Not Done With Yahoo, Circling For The Kill
- You know the joke about Microsoft — they normally get things almost right on the third try. After failing miserably to get Yahoo in two initial attempts thus far, Steve Ballmer and Co. might be returning for yet another try, reports The Wall Street Journal.Indeed, two weeks ago, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer called Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock to suggest they meet to discuss a new idea involving other partners, according to a person familiar with the matter…Yahoo remains skeptical about the viability of a deal that would break out its core search business. But the company remains open to discussing any proposal from Microsoft, people close to the company said.This time they are looking to team up with News Corp. and Time Warner and bid for Yahoo, and essentially carve it up. That said, the whole story is full of caveats. New details are now emerging that show a critical period in which Yahoo, under increased pressure from shareholders, pushed to sell itself to Microsoft. The overture came on May 17, two weeks after Microsoft officially dropped its pursuit of Yahoo.The Journal captures a lot of behind-the-scenes drama, though it doesn’t quite convince me that there is something major in the offing. However, it does remind me of the often-seen scene on National Geographic of the African Serengeti, lions and hyena circling a buffalo that’s bleeding from a previous attack. The buffalo, in this case, is Yahoo.I’m not sure how many people agree with me, but the whole Microsoft-Yahoo situation is just insane. I don’t even want to comment on Microsoft’s rationale to keep coming back to this deal. The desperation to go for Yahoo’s “search” business shows the world that Microsoft doesn’t put much faith in its own abilities. Well, at least that’s out of the way! The saddest part of this whole thing is watching Jerry Yang make missteps in public that might lead to the end of a company he helped start.
- » State of U.S. Broadband: Demand Hits Speed Bumps
- A new report from Pew Internet shows that broadband growth in the U.S. has slowed down to a crawl, a sign that U.S. broadband carriers would have to work hard to find ways to grow their overall businesses. Pew points out that 55 percent of adult Americans have home broadband connections. According to some estimates there are over 64 million broadband connections in the U.S. Some additional interesting bits from Pew’s report: Broadband users report an average monthly bill of $34.50 for high-speed service, 4 percent lower than the $36 reported by broadband users in December 2005.38 percent of those living in rural American now have broadband at home, compared with 31 percent who said this in 2007.The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 47 percent in early 2007 and 42 percent in early 2005.Cable broadband users pay $37 a month, down from $41 a month in 2005. DSL subscribers pay $31.50 a month down from $32 in 2005. Apparently, cable guys responded by price cuts (more like lower tiers) with increased competition from DSL companies.2 percent of home subscribers have fiber optic connection. Verizon FiOS should be thanked for this development.The research group finds out that low income groups — households with annual incomes of less than $20,000 — have started to cut back on broadband spending. Their broadband adoption rate had dropped to 25 percent in 2008 from 28 percent in 2007. It isn’t much of a surprise, because the economic downturn is forcing people to control and cut back their spending.
Earlier this year, telecom operators like Qwest & AT&T, pointed out they were experiencing the impact of this penny pinching. Of course, what didn’t help was the fact that it was their geographic footprint that played host to the housing bubble. New home sales drove the demand for broadband connections and as foreclosures started, the broadband party also started to wind down. The net new additions for the second quarter 2008 will tell an interesting story.My feeling is that this is hurting the DSL providers more than cable companies and they are scrambling to respond by offering higher speeds. The smaller providers like Embarq & Windstream could be impacted the worst by the slowdown.There is some research that shows that speed bumps are not quite the panacea for these carriers, though they might provide some temporary relief.Bruce Leichtman recently conducted a survey and found out that nearly 72 percent of cable broadband subscribers, and 62 percent of telco broadband subscribers are happy with their broadband connection’s quality and speed. Only 24 percent are interested in getting faster connection and a mere 11 percent of broadband subscribers would pay an “additional $10 per month to double their Internet speed.”In comparison, Pew’s report shows that 35 percent of dial-up users want broadband prices to decline further — fat chance of that happening when most carriers are dreaming of tiered Internet plans. Overall 62 percent of dial-up users say they are happy to be Slowskys. (That should make AOL and United Online rather happy.)Download Pew’s Home Broadband Report (pdf.) 
- » Structure 08 Recap: Yo Founders! There’s Gold in Them Clouds!
- GigaOM’s Structure 08 event offered a terrific opportunity to survey the changing landscape of computing infrastructure. But as with all technology shifts, innovation won’t just belong to the big established players like VMWare, Amazon, Google, Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com and NetSuite. With that in mind, Found|READ asked a panel of conference participants to share their thoughts
- » No More AT&T Callvantage?
- AT&T, long before it merged with SBC had made a half-hearted attempt at getting into consumer VoIP by selling a service called, CallVantage. It was surprisingly good, especially its call quality. Unfortunately, the company never quite made the commitment to it. And when SBC merger happened, well it fell victim of save-your-mentality that comes with
- » The Real Reason Powerset Sold (Out)
- Powerset founder Barney Pell used to turn blue in the face telling people how superior his company's approach to search was, yet now he's selling the firm to Microsoft for a rumored $100 million. The move is not, however, simply a reflection of how well Powerset was doing but of how much money the company was faced with spending in order to compete with Google.
- » Microsoft Not Done With Yahoo, Circling For The Kill
- You know the joke about Microsoft - they normally get things almost right on the third try. After failing miserably to get Yahoo in two initial attempts thus far, Steve Ballmer and Company might be returning for yet another try, reports The Wall Street Journal. Indeed, two weeks ago, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer called
- » The Good, the Bad & the Ugly of $7 Gas
- Imagine what it would be like if gas were $7 a gallon, or three and a half times the price at the beginning of last year. According to CIBC World Markets analyst Jeff Rubin, unless something gives, that’s what we can expect two pay — in less than two years time. Earth2Tech has the
- » No-Contract iPhone Found in AT&T Press Release
- If you want a 3G iPhone without an AT&T contract, you can get one. Eventually. For $599 for the 8 GB version or $699 for the 16 GB version. That’s a 200 percent markup over the $199 price tag for the 8 GB version with a contract. AT&T isn’t providing details yet on when this
- » 10 of the Biggest Platform Development Mistakes
- Just like with golf, technology is as much about ensuring that your bad hits are recoverable as it is ensuring that you make great ones. We’re all going to have failures in our careers but avoiding the really big pitfalls will help you keep your company on the right growth path. Here are 10 common mistakes we at AKF Consulting see made during platform development — and the ones we believe are the most important to avoid.1) Failing to design for rollback: If you’re developing a SaaS platform and you can only make one tweak to your current process, make it so that you can always roll back any code changes. We know that it takes additional engineering work and testing but in our experience, such effort yields the greatest ROI.2) Confusing product release with product success: Do you have ???release??? parties? Don’t — you are sending your team the wrong message. A release has little to do with creating shareholder value. Align your celebrations with achieving specific business objectives, such as increasing sign-ups by 10 percent.3) Assuming a new Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) will fix issues with missing delivery dates: Too often CTOs see repeated problems in their development life cycles, such as missing release dates, and wrongly blame the development methodology. Make sure you’re fixing the right thing — lack of ownership or involvement in and/or incomplete understanding of the current PDLC are among the most common root causes of late dates.4) Allowing history to repeat itself: Organizations don’t spend enough time looking at past failures. The best and easiest way to improve your future performance is to track your past failures, group them by causation and treat the root cause rather than the symptoms. Keep incident logs and review them monthly to identify recurring problems.5) Scaling through third parties: If you’re a hyper-growth SaaS site, you don’t want to be locked into a vendor for your future business viability; rather you want to make sure that the scalability of your site is a core competency and that it’s built into your architecture. Define how your platform scales through your efforts, not through the systems that a third-party vendor provides.6) Relying on QA to find your mistakes: You cannot test quality into a system and it’s mathematically impossible to test all possibilities within complex systems to guarantee the correctness of a platform or feature. QA is a risk mitigation function and it should be treated as such. Defects are an engineering problem, and that’s where the problem should be treated.7) Relying on “revolutionary” or ???big bang??? fixes: The degree of success of complete rewrites or re-architecture efforts typically ranges somewhere between not returning the expected ROI and complete failure. The best projects — and the ones with the greatest returns — are not revolutionary but evolutionary. Go ahead and paint that vivid description of the ideal future, but approach it as a series of small steps.8) Not taking into account the multiplicative effect of failure: Every time you have one service call another service in a synchronous fashion, you are lowering your theoretical availability. If each of your services is designed to be 99.999 percent available, then the product of all of the service calls is your theoretical availability. Five calls is (.99999)^5 or 99.995 availability. Eliminate synchronous calls wherever possible and create fault-isolative architectures to help you identify problems quickly. 9) Failing to create and incent a culture of excellence: Bring in the right people and hold them to high standards. You will never know what your team can do unless you find out how far they can go. Set aggressive yet achievable goals and motivate them with your vision. Be a leader.10) Not having a business continuity/disaster recovery plan: No one expects a disaster, but they happen, and if you can’t maintain normal business operations you will lose both revenue and customers. A solid business continuity plan explains to everyone how to operate in the event of an emergency. Even worse is not having a disaster recovery plan, which outlines how you will restore your site in the event a disaster shuts down a critical piece of your infrastructure, such as your collocation facility or connectivity provider. Our preference is to provide your own disaster recovery through multiple collocation facilities. Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher are partners with AKF Consulting.
- » A Founder’s “Daily Flash” for Executing in the First 6 Months
- Before he became a founder, Ian Shea spent eight years at DVR maker (and TiVo predecessor) ReplayTV. During that time, the company went through — among other things — a massive restructuring, layoffs, bankruptcy and a turnaround before finally being bought by DirectTV for an undisclosed amount in December 2007. “We went through it all,”
- » What’s Wrong With Yahoo?
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German writer, once noted that “if you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle in the opposite direction really doesn???t help.??? HBO series The Wire co-creator Edward Burns used that quote to describe the drug culture, bankruptcy of the political establishment and eventual fall of some of the great American cities in an interview with Reason magazine. You might as well use the same words to describe Yahoo! Over past few months, Yahoo???s destiny has become fodder for headlines and cheap shots including some by myself. What hasn???t really been discussed is the systematic rot that has set into the once proud company. What hasn’t been discussed is that the company isn’t really facing up to the fact that its layers of management have resulted in a state of masterful inactivity, masked perhaps as a culture of consensus. This starts at the top - from the company’s board and senior management down to VP level where people are prone to organizing and attending twenty meetings before deciding the fate of a project. Some senior managers including the ones who are deserting the company are skillful players in this game of hiding ennui behind grandiose plans and a great future that never happens. Others who have been wishing upon a change had realized the hard way about the futility of it all. Look at some of the public statements by those who have left recently and you will realize that the rot is very deep seated in this company. In past few weeks that has emerged as the single issue many Yahoo employees have discussed with me.Instead of addressing these issues - Yahoo is finding itself releasing memos to the media, writing letters and announcing yet another reorganization. They should have read the writing on the wall when the vice president exodus began two years ago. But instead, the company played executive version of musical chairs. Sort of how Rome’s rulers were busy reading tarot cards when the empire was collapsing.Earlier today, Kara Swisher broke the news that Zimbra co-founder Scott Dietzen will become the new Senior VP of communications and community properties. Dietzen is a very capable executive, smart, adroit and understated. He is the right man of the job, and can crack some heads if needed be. But can he succeed in an environment that rewards medocrity. Can he bring about change, or will he leave frustrated (but rich) like some of the other founders such as Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr who sold their companies to Yahoo.As part of changes announced today:Yahoo! is making changes to its technology organization, led by Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh, to better position the company to execute on its strategic priorities. Principal changes are developing a world-class cloud computing and storage infrastructure; rewiring Yahoo! onto common platforms; and creating a stronger partnership between product and engineering teams.In order to expand its cloud computing capabilities, the Company will form a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, charged with developing a computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness. It will move all consumer-facing platform teams to the Audience Technology Group, led by Venkat Panchapakesan. In addition, it is putting new leadership in place behind Yahoo!’s search group, naming Prabhakar Raghavan to direct search strategy and Tuoc Luong as the interim leader of the search product team. Both Prabhakar and Tuoc will also continue in their roles as the leaders of Yahoo! Research and Search Engineering respectively. In addition, David Ku will lead the Advertising Technology Group within Search.New CTO Ari Balogh is jazzed about cloud computing and storage. He should be - Yahoo is a big champion of Hadoop, an open source effort that can be immensely disruptive in years to come. Despite that, I don’t buy the spin Yahoo’s PR department put out today. At our Structure 08 event yesterday, Yahoo had very little representation.
- » Google Cloud At Work For NSF, Academia
- Christophe Bisciglia, Senior Software Engineer at Google, talks to NewTeeVee’s Chris Albrecht at our Structure 08 conference and discusses how Google is bring cloud computing to academia including the National Science Foundation.Google gives academics and students at some of the largest universities around the planet access to massive resources for academic quest and experiments, Bisciglia
- » Chad Hurley Tells All: How They Built YouTube
- Liz Gannes who edits our NewTeeVee site skipped the company dinner to attend an event where Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube was going to reveal the entire story of YouTube. She caught the entire event on tape, and has the full report, a must see NTV for anyone who loves start-ups.* If you can show
- » Why No One Will Replace Bill & Steve
- The retirement of Bill Gates marks not just the end of a computing era, but the end of an era of a certain type of technology entrepreneur. And he, along with Steve Jobs, cannot be replaced. Continue Reading.
- » Hey Startups, Amazon Gets It
- One of the questions that I really wanted to get answered at Structure 08 was what the chances of survival are for the myriad of startups out there building their businesses around Amazon’s Web Services. Companies such as RightScale, Hyperic and Soasta depend on both the success of AWS and its shortcomings — the solutions
- » Can Today’s Hardware Handle the Cloud?
- Storing data in a server is a tried and tested process. In the cloud, however, storage is still a work in progress. And the cloud model puts increased pressure on networking and server equipment -- and on vendors to make their components reliable.
- » What’s Wrong With Yahoo?
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German writer, once noted that “if you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle in the opposite direction really doesn’t help.” HBO series The Wire co-creator Edward Burns used that quote to describe the drug culture, bankruptcy of the political establishment and eventual fall of some of the great American
- » Introducing GigaOM Briefings
- Yesterday, at our Structure08 conference we launched our newest effort, GigaOM Briefings. We launch with our first briefing on Cloud Computing, which has been written by Alistair Croll, whose work you know from our site. So what are our Briefings? Briefings are downloadable digital reports that contain in-depth, timely and actionable information on current technologies
- » Can Power Grid Be Hacked?
- A smarter network doesn’t necessarily mean a safer network, or so goes the thinking when it comes to the new intelligent power grid. It is seen as an increased security risk. It has been rumored that Chinese paramilitary hackers have tired to take down the U.S. power grid and caused blackouts. Former CIA director-turn-venture-capitalist James Woolsey asked
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