» Virtualization

History of expertise in multi-server management and load balancing; good integration with VMware's Distributed Resource Scheduler; longer track record than most competitors.

History of lackluster marketing left IT audience unaware of its potential; powerful tools often complex, requiring deep expertise on staff to use them effectively.

Open source credibility, stability, lower cost than closed-source software products.

Competing against Microsoft, VMware and almost every other big systems or OS company in the business.

Serves as a kind of virtual intrusion detection system, adding layer of security policies inside the physical boxes where the VMs live. May be useful to block potential threats like hypervisor attacks, among other possible future troubles.

It's still early days for virtualization security.

Speed benefits for deployment and disaster recovery; IP address management tools.

Lots of competition in the tools and management space right now.

Leading vendor of "pure" Unix—which is well suited to virtualization; built hypervisors and arrangement deeply into its OS; main business is the class of servers most often chosen for consolidation projects.

Historic enmity with Microsoft might disrupt Solaris/Windows VM integration; commoditization of Xen hypervisor reduces attractiveness of Solaris; focus on SPARC may turn off integration-minded customers.

Ability to spread computing load across VMs residing on different physical servers; focus on peak-load management as well as data center consolidation and business continuity.

Reliance on Xen hypervisor as Red Hat, Novell and others make it almost a commodity; competing with VMware at the height of that company's market dominance.

One of a relatively small number of ISVs offering performance management, disaster recovery and server replication.

As hypervisors become more common, hypervisor vendors continue to add more management, recovery and other functions, squeezing companies like Vizioncore; main competitor Platespin was acquired by comparatively deep-pocketed Novell.

Holds more than 80 percent of server virtualization market; wider support from third-party vendors than any other virtualization vendor; multiple-OS support; software-only, doesn't require microprocessor enhancements; fewer restrictions on licensing and format than Microsoft; no requirement for a specific OS.

Increasing competition with Microsoft may create integration problems for IT; VMware is slow to add support for SATA and other hardware enhancements; requires special clustered file system and storage area network space.