I’m in the English countryside this week, where I’ve been hearing all about XenSource, the major Citrix acquisition and the company’s entrée into the brave new world of virtualization via the Zen of Xen.
The market is an interesting one: it’s one of the few that only has a couple of players (and two of them new to boot), including the heavyweight VMWare, new entrant Microsoft, and Citrix’s semi-open-source XenSource.
Citrix bought its way into the market, plain and simple, but the company has been throwing a lot of weight behind its new market. But the road to success seems to be a different one. To start with, the company actually helped Microsoft get its own HyperV off the ground. Merrily they went off to Redmond to help the giant enter the market.
But, as Crosby said yesterday, XenSource is interesting in that it claims that it doesn’t want to compete straight-across with other companies. (Although, amusingly, lead for the Xen Project and XenSource co-founder Ian Pratt was quick to point out that the brand-new XenServer 5 has 80 per cent of VMWare’s features that make it “very competitive with VMWare.”) And it doesn’t want to adhere to the typical open-source, either.
I spoke with Citrix CTO and XenSource co-founder Simon Crosby today about some of these issues, and it’s an intriguing strategy, and one that seems to combine the best of open-source with a savvier, forward-looking MO that seeks to spread virtualization all over the damn place.
One key is mixing proprietary bits and non-proprietary bits. That way, the users get the best of both worlds. They can tinker, or just buy one of the various versions (or download the free one). “This offers more of an upsell,” said Crosby.
I also dig the tagline: “fast, free, and ubiquitous virtualization.” Sure, it’s a revenue-building tagline, but I bought it. It has a whiff of the people, and the scrappy spirit of XenSource’s open-source roots. XenSource wants to keep apace with the growing virtualization space, and have placed a heavy emphasis on interoperability. “The typical Microsoft project takes four to five years before they can support the next great thing,” he said. This tack seems like it would be super-useful for IT managers—no need to fret about what you’re running, or what it works with. Just stick the product on your old VMWare or bare metal, or your Microsoft.
And if you don’t like it? Change it. Tinker. Plenty of companies download the damn thing willy-nilly and use it for whatever they want. The New York Times, for instance, created a massive archive of its old material over a weekend using a free Xen app.
Citrix isn’t exactly a snazzy player on the scene. As Pratt said, “It was a one-product company, and then they got a broader portfolio, but people didn’t necessarily notice.”) but striking out with XenSource seems to be a great move. For years they seemed kinda boring or stagnant (once you had Metaframe, or, more recently, NetScaler, who needed to hear from them again?), but now they’re tapped into the open-source community. Crosby said, “The rate of innovation is incredible, and it’s a brutally efficient process.”
The company has some challenges ahead, said Crosby, including battling device diversity, and convincing people to embrace the company’s “per virtual machine” pricing. I’d also assume that bringing XenDesktop to the masses could require a mind-shift for users—and a big shift for IT manager workflow. Innovation can be painful.
But the company’s constant pushing into new areas is inspiring—look at its cloud success so far (they count Google, Amazon, and Yahoo as clients) and its clear frontrunner status in the client-side virtualization race. Here’s hoping being Zen pays off in more than just karma.