Vizard: IBM Gets Principled About the Channel
Big Blue looks to improve its reputation with a Principles of
Engagement document governing how internal salespeople deal with the
channel.
Looking to make greater inroads into the SMB market, VMware announces deals to certify its hypervisor technology on the servers of a handful of ODM white box manufacturers.
Looking to expand its market to reach more SMBs and geographies, VMware has
announced that it will certify its VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor on servers
offered by certain white box manufacturers.
The virtualization vendor announced its new relationships with ODMs (original
design manufacturers) ASUS, Gigabyte, Inventec and Tyan at Computex Taipei. The
new ODM relationships are in addition to VMware's deal with Supermicro,
announced in February.
VMware's move is designed to capture more of the SMB market and also make
greater inroads in geographies where white box servers have a strong presence,
according to Ben Matheson, director of product management.
"This opens up a much broader opportunity for VMware," he said.
"The SMB space is definitely the laggard in terms of adoption of
virtualization technology. About a quarter to a third of the servers that ship
are ODM servers."
But that doesn't mean that SMBs aren't interested in virtualization.
According to Matheson, SMBs have the same pain points as enterprise
companies.
"Server virtualization becomes interesting at about five servers," he
said. "Then it helps reduce costs. Maybe we are only consolidating
10 or 15 servers down to two servers, but to those businesses that's a big
chunk of money."
VMware ESX and ESXi are currently available on server systems from
Supermicro and are expected to be available from ASUS, Gigabyte, Inventec and
Tyan by the end of the third quarter of 2008.
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