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VMWare’s IPO was a great showing for the power of virtualization. They have built a great product and a great company and congratulations to all involved. However, I think the purchase of XenSource for 500X to 150X revenues – depending on whose revenue number you believe, really proved how important virtualization technology is becoming. Servers, storage, networking, desktops, appliances…. They’re all going virtual and for good reason – virtualization unties the binds of the enterprise and frees up hardware to be utilized at its maximum value. That’s the power of virtualization. Users actually get what they pay for in terms of hardware. Of course, someone has to manage all of these virtual bits and tie them together in nice, neat packages that can really free the data center. That’s where Processing Area Networks come in. It’s the glue that binds together all of these physical and virtual systems that are proliferating in the data center. Stove pipes of virtualization will just put us back in the early days of client/server computing where stove pipe applications kept popping up in the data center until someone decided to manage them (see Tivoli, BMC, CA, etc.). Phase 1 of virtualization is pretty much complete and the inventors have done well for themselves. The next battle will be managing the phase 1 virtualization. Oh yeah, and as for IBM supporting Solaris x86. It’s just another example of the big guys trailing our lead – our blades have supported Solaris for well over a year. Welcome aboard!