Even people who shudder at the mere mention "virtualization" can't ignore the hottest topic in today's high-tech world for much longer. Only a couple of weeks ago the market leader, VMware, completed a successful IPO, raising over $900 million. A few days later Citrix. announced that it will pay $500 million for one of VMware's competitors, XenSource.

Being relatively new, the virtualization market hosts only a small number of big players. VMware is the biggest, with a market share of about 85 percent, followed by XenSource and Microsoft. Against these giants, one tiny company believes its technology can earn it a significant cut of the emerging market: Qumranet.

The company was founded in 2005 and employs just 35 people, but behind Qumranet can be found some familiar names, like Benny Schneider and Rami Tamir, who founded Pentacom and P-Cube, both sold to Cisco for $320 million, and CTO Dr. Moshe Bar, who was one of the founders of XenSource.

"We've decided to go for virtualization because it's one of the hottest areas at the moment,"says CEO Benny Schneider in an interview with TheMarker IT. "And we plan to compete directly with XenSource."

Inside the Kernel

Like its competitors, Qumranet is developing a virtualization solution that enables users to run several operating systems on a single computer. This way they can launch a Windows OS from Linux, or run a large number of operating systems on a single server, allowing fewer physical servers and saving on hardware and electricity.

However, Qumranet's software, which is called KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), has one special advantage: it is already embedded in the code of the Linux OS. Since it is an open source product, Qumranet was able to convince the developers of the Linux kernel to integrate KVM as part of the operating system, saving the need to install it.

"Our product is inside Linux distributions like Red-Hat's Fedora, Ubuntu and soon we will be inside Novell's SUSE," says Schneider. "This is actually the publicly available half of the product. Toward the end of the year we will release the other half -- a commercial product intended for big organizations, based on KVM."

Many companies today use Linux based servers, and Qumranet hopes that some of them will choose to buy its product because KVM is already in the operating system they work with. Furthermore, according to Schneider, unlike the other products on the market, the fact that KVM is integrated as part of the Linux kernel gives it an advantage in terms of performance.