The last seven days has seen a flurry of activity in the IT vendor community, much of it centred on the complex and rapidly expanding area of 'virtualisation'. Cisco has been holding its Networker 2008 show where there was much discussion around the pivotal, though thoroughly underappreciated, topic of virtualisation and the potential impact network management holds in delivering and administering the effective deployment and consumption of all IT services, not just those running in virtualised environments. It is, I think, fair to say that very few people recognise the role that Network optimisation and management has to play in IT generally and with virtualised systems in particular. This is an area where Cisco needs to undertake extensive efforts to communicate what can be achieved today and the benefits that flow from effective management of all forms of network traffic.

And then along came Microsoft with an announcement of an acquisition in the virtualisation space and the extension of its long standing alliance with Citrix that could have profound repercussions. The acquisition of Calista Technologies is interesting, not for the scale of the acquisition of the relatively small privately held company, but for the medium term impact the inclusion of Calista's technologies that are used to improve end user experience of graphics on displays when the source of the application is remote from the user and the local device being used may not have sophisticated hardware in place to deal with the rendering complex, resource hungry graphics. For many users of systems the behaviour of their screen colours the entire user application experience, an issue that has challenged thin client and virtualised systems as they struggle to deliver and manipulate complex images on systems that may not have been built with such demands in mind.

Microsoft then followed this with news that it is once again expanding its relationship with Citrix, a partner that has long worked with Microsoft in the area of thin client / server centric computing solutions. The news this week saw the two organisations announce that together they plan to create and market joint virtualization solutions based around the soon to be formally launched Windows Server 2008 platform. The new offerings will utilise the next generation of Citrix Presentation Server and Citrix XenDesktop products, which rely heavily on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Optimized Desktop features, and will be managed by Microsoft System Center. It is very clear that Microsoft and Citrix, who already enjoy many significant joint agreements, will continue to operate very closely together. What remains to be seen is just how fiercely they will compete in areas where they hold rival solution offerings.

Not satisfied with these developments, Microsoft went even further in showing its acceptance, and increasingly obvious promotion, of virtual systems when it stated that it was increasing the flexibility it provides in several important aspects of licensing of Windows Vista, both for home users and enterprises. At the same time the company acknowledged that it will formally support Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 when run using either Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 or its SoftGrid Application Virtualization 4.2. These are good first steps but, as our research highlights, there is considerable pressure from customers requesting that Microsoft publicly support both Office applications and its other tools when they are used on a variety of virtualisation platforms, including those supplied by competitors such as VMware amongst others.

It is apparent that Microsoft is now not only accepting the reality of virtualisation solutions but is beginning to embrace them. It must however accept that other virtualisation platforms are out there and that its customers want Microsoft's support when competitive platforms are used. The sooner Microsoft, and frankly all the other ISPs, does so the better life will be not for their customers alone but for Microsoft itself.