This year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference will be in Houston. In July. One word: Ugh.

And, interestingly, insiders say preliminary numbers show that more than half (60%) of attendees will be from outside the U.S. That’s a first, to my knowledge and is at least partially attributable to the incredible shrinking dollar.

Note to vendors: If you’re gonna drag people into triple-digit heat and humidity, make it cheap.

As for news: Look for Microsoft to talk up repeatable solutions in SMB markets. And don’t forget SaaS and the mega-billion dollar question of how partners fit into Microsoft’s software plus services game plan. That’ll be a big theme.  Read more »

VMware’s “cloud computing” strategy set me off on a little rant last week. I wrote that VMware was likely getting into SaaS because it was either inspired by or jealous of Google’s success in the “cloud.”

Now it turns out that VMware is following Google’s footsteps in another area as well. And luckily, someone else has taken care of the criticism this time.

If you haven’t noticed, nearly all of Google’s services — including GMail, Google News and Google Apps — are still in beta, even though they’re years old. Andrew Kutz, who writes on our sister blog Virtualization Pro, points out that several new VMware features — including Storage VMotion and Virtual Machine High Availability — are also in beta or labeled “experimental.” Kutz writes:

Excuse me for being old fashioned, but it isn’t enterprise-ready if it is beta or labeled experimental. And VMware makes no bones about this; they plainly state that these features should not be used in production. However, on the other hand they make a big show about the same set of features, whipping the crowd to a fever pitch of excitement. You can’t have it both ways, guys.

… VMware needs to make sure that features that are experimental should be announced with an asterisk next to their headline.

VMware should be doing a better job separating hype from reality when talking about these products. But it looks like that job will instead fall to VMware partners. When your customers ask about Storage VMotion, for example, tell them it’s promising, but also point out that it doesn’t yet have a GUI option. You’re the last line of defense to keep customers from heading down the dead-end road of hype.

Bad news for people who hate buzzwords: Another big-time IT vendor is getting into “cloud computing.”

This time it’s VMware, whose president and CEO Diane Greene talked up cloud computing during a speech yesterday in Boston. My colleague at SearchServerVirtualization.com, Bridget Botelho, was there, and she reports that VMware will use the “cloud” to differentiate itself among increasing competition in the virtualization market.

“The dream of cloud computing is fast becoming reality,” Greene said during her keynote at the JP Morgan Technology Conference.

VMware becomes the latest traditional IT vendor, inspired by — or jealous of — the success of Google and Salesforce.com, to get into cloud computing.

“Cloud computing” is less annoyingly known as “Software as a Service,” although that term opens up a whole new can of buzzword worms. I’ve heard people refer to “Platform as a Service,” “Hardware as a Service,” and someone I recently talked to actually used the term ”Service as a Service.” Um, excuse me?

Anyway, back to the VMware news. I’m not even sure how “virtualization in the cloud” or “Virtualization as a Service” or whatever you want to call it would work. Virtualization stores information and applications in a data center and recreates an image of that data on a server, endpoint or other appliance. So in that regard it’s similar to cloud computing, which stores information and applications in a data center for users to access through a Web browser on a PC or mobile device.

Other recent examples of vendors getting into SaaS include Microsoft, which is now pushing its Dynamics CRM Online, and Symantec, which released its Online Backup Service. It remains to be seen if the model will work for these vendors who are giants in the on-premise software world — or even what the model is, in VMware’s case. But for now, the buzzwords work, and apparently that’s all that matters.

VMware is going on the attack yet again, slamming Microsoft in a 2,000-word missive on its Virtual Reality blog.

In case you forgot, Virtual Reality is the blog VMware set up specifically to defend itself from criticism by the media, analysts and competitors. The most recent post targets the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool, an online calculator that partners can use to make the business case for Microsoft virtualization.

“Unfortunately we had to give it a failing grade,” writes VMware blogger Tim Stephan.

The post features a pretty in-depth analysis of the assumptions and calculations that Microsoft’s tool makes in “proving” that the upcoming Hyper-V hypervisor is a better value than VMware’s products. (Microsoft’s site doesn’t mention VMware, only a “competitive server virtualization solution.” As Stephan writes, “Gee, I wonder who the competitive solution is?”)

But the best part of the blog are the no-holds-barred shots that Stephan takes at Microsoft throughout. They include:

• “Of course the results were all hypothetical, because Hyper-V is not yet available.”
• “Like most Microsoft version 1.0 products, the initial release of this calculator has numerous errors, contains critical design mistakes, and completely misses its mark. … Maybe we all need to wait for the SP1?”
• “Microsoft’s tool assumes that Hyper-V will run as many VMs as VMware VI3 and deliver the same performance - we can’t wait until Hyper-V ships and prove (sic) this wrong.”

The blog also features this quiz:

Why did MSFT release such a misleading ROI/TCO model?
A) Microsoft did a sloppy and hasty job with the calculator
B) Microsoft is deliberately fudging the facts
C) Both A and B

Microsoft has been promoting its calculator to partners as they prepare to sell Hyper-V and try to chip away at VMware’s server virtualization market lead. I’m in no position to say who’s right and who’s wrong about the tool and its assumptions, but Microsoft partners might want to check out VMware’s stance before they start relying on the calculator too heavily. 

VMware has previously used Virtual Reality to accuse Microsoft of spreading lies, discredit a Yankee Group report and post “corrections” to a blog comparing VMware and Microsoft.

SearchITChannel.com has lined up interviews with two major channel executives for this week’s Partner News Podcast.

Julie Parrish, Symantec’s vice president of global channel sales, will call in to talk about changes to Symantec’s deal registration program and other topics facing Symantec partners.

We’ll also be joined by Al Monserrat, the vice president of worldwide channels and emerging product sales for Citrix. Citrix Synergy 2008, the company’s annual partner and customer conference, is this week in Houston, so there will be no shortage of news to discuss.

The podcast will be available for streaming or download Friday on SearchITChannel.com and the IT Channel Podcasts page at SearchITChannel.com/download.

EMC stock is rising amid speculation the company will sell off VMware, according to a Bloomberg story hot off the virtual press.

The story quotes one New York equity trader who says rumors about EMC selling its majority stake in VMware have been picking up recently. And another trader tells Bloomberg that observers are expecting some big news out of EMC’s annual meeting next week.

Virtualization.info chimes in that Intel is the rumored buyer.

EMC announced its plans to acquire VMware, the virtualization market giant, for $635 million late in 2003. VMware still operates independently from EMC and keeps its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., across the country from EMC’s base in Hopkinton, Mass.

Slowly but surely, some of the big high-tech vendors have started pulling their channel partners into their “green technology” efforts. As Barbara Darrow blogged earlier this week, Sun is the latest to put a formal stake in the ground. Actually, honestly, they’re the first high-tech vendor that I can think of that really has made a public effort to include its VARs in this green thing.

So, in case you’re wondering just how much opportunity exists for services related to green technology rationalization, I wanted to share some statistics that were recently released by Forrester Research as part of a report called “The Dawn of Green IT Services.”

First, the bottom line: Forrester believes that overall services related to helping companies rationalize the energy efficiency and sustainability profile of their technology will peak at $4.8 billion in 2013, with roughly half of that spending coming from European businesses. (The services revenue for this year is expected to be around $500 million.) Much like the Y2K wave, green tech services will begin to taper off after this point as the practices become more a standard part of running an IT infrastructure, Forrester concludes. Another note: North America companies will be slower on the uptake than those in Europe, with spending peaking around $2.1 billion in 2013, the firm reports.

You can compartmentalize the opportunity for green tech services into three different buckets: the assessment phase, the planning and development phase, and the implementation phase.

As you might expect, assessments present the shortest-term opportunity, running between two and 10 weeks and costing $30,000 to $100,000. Only about 50 percent of companies will proceed to the next phase: detailed planning. But, Forrester figures that those that do should be willing to spend between $50,000 and $400,000 on roadmaps for any number of initiatives such as server virtualization and consolidation, an enhanced power infrastructure, and more energy-efficient servers and other gear.

Need more convincing that green tech isn’t just a boondoogle?

The big jackpot will go to those VARs and integrators that become involved in making green tech plans become reality. The implementation phases of these projects will take from 30 weeks to more than 100 weeks, according to Forrester. They can cost from $300,000 to $2 million — for the services alone.

By the way, here are some efforts that Forrester considers to crowd under the green IT umbrella:

• Green procurement policies
• E-waste recycling
• Data center optimization
• Supply chain optimization
• Building automation projects
• Collaboration and conferencing initiatives
• Managed print services

Heather Clancy is a high-tech journalists and strategic communications consultant with SWOT Management Group. She can be reached at hclancy@swotmg.com.

Sun Microsystems says it will help partners build eco-friendly IT solutions.

The company’s Eco Advantage Program offers partners tools to calculate for themselves or for their customers how to deploy the best, most energy efficient information technology.

“Partners can take customer data at the server and app level, profile [that] and develop the best case analysis/scenario. They can provide the carbon emission savings, space savings, cooling savings, ” said Bill Cate, senior director of global channel planning and programs for Palo Alto-based Sun.

The program includes the afore mentioned Eco Assessment Service, which evaluates actual data center energy use, cooling, air flow etc.; training on data center power and cooling needs; and modeling tools to help simulate energy requirements of alternative datacenter setups.

Helping customers save money is one way to go into accounts in a collaborative way, said Dermot Duggan, senior director for Sun’s eco drive.

“You can go into your installed base or new accounts and have a rare opportunity where you will get no pushback. You can say, ‘I can save you this much money’ and back that up with real data tied to the customer’s actual servers and storage.”

Hardly any customer will say no to paying less, right?

Vince Conroy, CTO of FusionStorm, San Francisco-based Sun partner said the program aligns with what his company is doing.

“We’ve developed a data center practice and energy conservation is an important component of that,” Conroy said.

Technologies like server virtualization, thin clients, virtual desktop computing, all play into that message.

And, since FusionStorm does some of its own hosting as well as managed services, cost savings are important to its bottom line as well.

Customers are starting to ask about energy efficient computing, although it’s not yet a groundswell, he said. ” It starts with some of the more forward thinking customers and they may be forward thinking because it makes business sense and they’re business savvy or this is a cause for them. In either case we’re seeing more activity [in energy efficient computing.”

Server virtualization, as has been reported endlessly, is one way to get bigger workloads out of fewer boxes and that will be key here. Asked whether it’s really in Sun’s best interests to sell fewer rather than more boxes and CPUs

As to whether it’s really in Sun’s best interests to sell fewer servers, Cates and Duggan said the trend is clear. Either Sun will sell more efficient technology or someone else will.
For hosting partners, the attraction of saving on cooling and electricity is obvious, but it’s also away for partners to help customers save money and perhaps divert some of those savings to additional services.

And the company’s quick to say it’s taking its own medicine, that its latest servers, built on the UltraSPARC T2 chips use multithreading technology and cram 5X the compute power into half the space and get 2.5 times better performance per megawatt.
The Sun execs said the company, through its own eco efforts, received $1 million in rebates onfrom PG&E over the last 12 months.

The company is hardly alone many hardware vendors have jumped on the green bandwagon: Hewlett Packard and IBM also have eco initiatives going.

 Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Say what you will about VMware, but they sure aren’t shy when it comes to publicly taking on the competition. Whether it’s an employee attacking Citrix on his personal blog or sales memos that try to drive a wedge between Microsoft and Citrix, the server virtualization market share leader doesn’t pull too many punches.

The latest example comes from Virtual Reality, the corporate blog VMware set up just to defend itself from bad publicity — or, as they call it, “set the record straight.” Its new post comes from VMware’s Mark Chuang, who criticizes Microsoft for distributing a Yankee Group report that doesn’t exactly paint VMware in the best light.

The reason the report is unflattering to VMware? Because much of it was innacurate, according to Chuang — so much so, he says, that Yankee Group agreed to publish a revision and removed the original from its website.

That hasn’t stopped the ever opportunistic Microsoft from spreading the report around, most recently in a virtualization newsletter this week, Chuang says. He also accuses Microsoft of continuing to distribute the report despite a request from Yankee Group to stop.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft keeps drawing attention to the report and, if so, what action VMware takes to stop them.

Hewlett-Packard yesterday began shipping VMware’s ESX 3i hypervisor embedded in its ProLiant servers.

After news broke last month that Dell may give away the ESX 3i for free with its servers, VMware resellers began to fear that other VMware OEM partners would follow suit — essentially killing their business in ESX 3i sales. But that isn’t happening in HP’s case, as virtualization.info reports that the company will charge $495 extra for servers with the ESX 3i.

All of VMware’s OEM partners should begin shipping servers with the ESX 3i sometime this month, and it will be interesting to see if the others follow Dell’s strategy or HP’s. Microsoft’s Hyper-V also hits the market later this year, and that release should have a major effect on VMware’s ESX 3i pricing as well. Microsoft plans to charge just $28 extra for Windows Server 2008 editions that feature Hyper-V.