Oracle's virtualization honeymoon discussed

CW reporting:

An island unto itself?

Galen Shreck, principal analyst for Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc., says despite Oracle's considerable install base and application breadth, the company will be unable to convince customers to flock to its nascent virtualization technology for third-party applications. He said Oracle will have its hands full trying to keep pace with ensconced server virtualization companies.

CW here

Opinions from Slashdot:

I can't see the link between a Xen-based hypervisor and and a company being punished for a "unpatched zero-day vulnerability" that doesn't look like it is part of the hypervisor. Also, I can't see why the stock price would drop based on critical bugs. Stock prices should reflect number of people buying the software anyway. Hence Microsoft stock have value.

Yadda yadda, if Oracle doesn't fix it's own licensing policy than they still will be looking to take you hard for database licenses. They don't recognize software partitioning as a valid means of buying less licenses than there are CPU's in the physical box and when you run VMware in a cluster they want you to license your whole cluster.

Discuss on ./

Reuter wonders if this is a bad news for VMware:

"Is this bad news for VMware? Yes," said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research. "This tells us that the virtualization market will not belong to VMware. One of the players will be Oracle. Until today that news has not been factored into the stock price."

VMware could not immediately be reached for comment.

Reuters covering it here.

And CNN discussed the virtualization marketplace as HP and Oracle make entry:

Virtualization addresses these issues by, in essence, creating something out of nothing. Loosely defined, virtualization is software that creates a virtual version of something, like an operating system, server or data storage device. That type of software cuts down on the number of servers needed, eliminates downtime during upgrades and simplifies system maintenance.

Following the rise of VMware, the virtualization company whose initial public offering was among the year's best, Dell Inc. (DELL) purchased a virtualization company, Equallogic, for $1.4 billion. Meanwhile, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) also has significant operations in this area.

And on Monday, H-P introduced new virtualization products for data centers, which are giant warehouses filled with computer hardware for storing, managing and disseminating electronic data.

The products from H-P provide a much clearer picture of H-P's virtualization strategy, which to date has been largely a mystery, said Jason Kotsaftis, director of strategic alliances at EMC Corp. (EMC).

"They really needed to get their strategy out," he said.

CNNmoney here