Novell Makes a Major Statement with PlateSpin Acquisition

Today's announcement that Novell will acquire PlateSpin is hard not to like on any level, unless of course you're one of Novell's competitors in the x86 virtualization space. Some of you may not have noticed Novell's work on its Xen hypervisor implementation or with its ZENworks Virtual Machine Manager solution. Until now, it could be said that Novell has made little waves in the virtualization market. In fact, recently I have thought of Novell as being the Switzerland of server virtualization. Novell has plenty of friends, including VMware and Microsoft, and has been an active contributor to the open source Xen hypervisor and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) open virtualization standards efforts. Unless you are one that resents the fact that Novell partnered with long term enemy Microsoft, it's hard to find a reason to have animosity for Novell.

To me, the acquisition makes sense for both vendors. PlateSpin is the clear market leader in physical to virtual (P2V), virtual to virtual (V2V), and virtual to physical (V2P) conversion software, with their PowerConvert product being the backbone of many successful virtualization migration projects. However, PlateSpin saw a significant rise in competition in the P2V conversion space in 2007 with vendors such as VMware giving away conversion tools  (i.e. VMware Converter) as part of their virtual infrastructure software purchase. PlateSpin also has a popular virtualization migration planning tool, PowerRecon, and has seen strong competition in the planning space by rival upstart CiRBA. So for PlateSpin, the timing for an acquisition was right on.

By all means, Novell is not getting a deflating balloon. PlateSpin has great technology and has been cleverly repurposing PowerConvert as a disaster recovery (DR) staging tool. When you factor in Novell's long term history with file system efficiency, the experience of Novell's engineering staff should elevate PowerConvert's performance and feature set. And it should be a safe bet that PowerConvert is going to soon support NetWare P2V migrations to Xen-based VMs on Open Enterprise Server 2. NetWare support has been a long running "joke" between myself and some of the PlateSpin folks. For years I have asked "When will you support NetWare P2V migrations?" and for years they have replied "It's on our road map!"

Now let's get back to Novell. Novell has some extremely bright folks on their Xen hypervisor and ZENworks engineering teams and the result is a server virtualization solution that I believe will be ready for enterprise workloads by mid-2008. Of course, at this point Novell needs to elbow itself into a competitive crowd in the x86 virtualization space and compete against the heavyweights such as VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix, while also taking on vendors like Virtual Iron who have done well in selling to the mid-market.

Today is a good time to take a step back and look at what Novell has accomplished. When others are writing consoles for their own platform, Novell is writing/acquiring software to manage multiple platforms. When others are talking about supporting the DMTF's SVPC profiles, Novell has already done it. In fact, Novell engineers at VMworld in September 2007 were demonstrating some elements of Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). Novell has clearly let their technology do the talking, with an open virtualization solution and heterogeneous virtualization management platform. Now it's time for Novell to talk up its technology. 

Novell - if you are to make a serious run at the virtualization market, the time is now. The PlateSpin acquisition is an excellent start toward building credibility and getting prospects to look your way. Your ZENworks Orchestrator solution is one more. If you're going to gain virtualization market share, you need to be more than nice to your competitors - you need to take the fight to them. Although you still have some work to do, today's announcement puts the others on notice that you’re no longer just a contributor but are now a player in the virtualization market.

Posted by: Chris Wolf