Virtualization in all its many forms is taking the technology world by storm. Server, desktop or application virtualization all promise to save IT organizations a tremendous amount of time and money by maximizing resources and minimizing the effort required to manage and maintain systems.
While VMware's (VMW) home page (http://www.vmware.com) touts a bold claim "100% of the Fortune 100 Trust VMware", it may be that mid-sized businesses actually have the most to gain in the short-run from this emerging technology hype-cycle. Neophyte's to the world of virtualization and its extensive web of jargon find the concepts abstract and difficult to understand. There's a natural tendency -- therefore -- to assume it's a technology best left to the big guys with deep pockets and sophisticated IT resources. That assumption is wrong.
KACE has made its name serving the desktop and server systems management needs of mid-sized enterprise customers. And, from our vantage point, we've watched our customers adopt virtual technology at an increasing rate for the last three years. We've listened carefully to our customers and interviewed them extensively related to their plans to adopt virtualization technologies. What we've found is that many are already rolling out virtualization technology today. And others, are anxious to move that direction this year as they see an opportunity to stretch their IT dollars by getting more from their existing infrastructure. In the world of the mid-sized enterprise, budgets and resources are stretched already, so it's even more compelling for them to explore new technologies that promise to save them time and money.
In our view, the combination of tight budgets, limited resources and tangible, immediate benefits related to virtual technologies are driving these mid-sized businesses to adopt virtual technology even faster than their Fortune 1000 counterparts. And, with many players still vying to unseat VMware as the de facto gorilla in the virtualization market (e.g., Citrix Xensource, Sun xVM, Microsoft Hyper-V), we see the mid-sized enterprise emerging as a key battleground for market dominance.
Even as virtualization promises to help businesses get the most out of their IT resources, there are many indications that increased use of virtualization will add complexity to the systems management discipline. Regardless of company size, as more and more systems are virtualized there's impending explosive growth in the number of discrete managed operating systems requiring management attention from IT. That's leading to an opportunity for systems management players like KACE.
KBOX products manage both physical and virtual environments today. Furthermore, we've led the market with some virtual-specific management capabilities such as vState management. And, this week, KACE announced the general availability of its vKBOX offering which brings the benefits of the appliance-based packaging that KBOX pioneered to customers leveraging VMware infrastructure such as VMware ESX, VMware Server and VMware Player. This new packaging option for our customers allows organizations to opt either for our hardware appliance or to install KBOX as a virtual appliance within VMware.
Even as we extend our lead in the systems management appliance arena and expand our offerings to for managing virtual environments, we're working on a number of new products and technologies to speed adoption of and improve management of virtual infrastructure. Stay tuned for more from KACE...
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