"Until 2008, VMware was the only choice, their hypervisor cost thousands of dollars, and they had the market to themselves," says Citrix CTO Simon Crosby in this Exclusive Q&A in the run-up to the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo next month in New York. "In 2008, Citrix and Microsoft bring customers an open architecture, a price/performance and feature set that is difficult to beat, and a powerful channel that can deliver customers a real choice for their virtual infrastructure for the first time," he adds.

"Importantly," Crosby continues, "our products will all also add value to VMware virtualized infrastructure, to fully support customers that have purchased VMware enterprise licenses."

Read the rest of the Exclusive Q&A with Citrix CTO Simon Crosby here

In the wide-ranging interview with SYS-CON's Jeremy Geelan, Crosby was asked why he thought IT had taken so long to catch up with the full potential of virtualization. This was his reply:

"Enterprise IT has not been standing still. Indeed virtualization is already widely used, but primarily for the first-order benefit, namely server consolidation. The second-order benefits of agility, availability and manageability of the IT stack are now becoming better understood, and as a consequence virtualization has moved from a tactical tool for gaining immediate savings, to become a key strategic theme for every IT department. 

 

But there is also another key factor that changes in 2008. Until this year the competition in the market was really only VMware and XenSource – a tiny startup. The acquisition by Citrix gives our product, XenServer, a huge channel, a large investment in features, additional value-added functions that leverage Xen, 24x7 worldwide support and all the clout needed to serve true enterprise customers and use cases. As we go to market with XenServer, we also collaborate closely with Microsoft, who will deliver Hyper-V to market in the summer. Our intention is to leverage both footprints to deliver powerful virtualization-optimized solutions to customers for data-center automation, virtual desktop infrastructure and application delivery. Citrix products XenServer, XenDesktop and XenApp, all contain virtualization as a core feature set (server, desktop and application, respectively)."Read the rest of the Exclusive Q&A with Citrix CTO Simon Crosby here