GOC

Citrix and Virtual Iron have come out in the open with differing opinions regarding the Xen open source-based hypervisor market.

 

Citrix claims to own XenSource and be in charge of driving the Xen project. The company defines Virtual Iron as merely a consumer of the product, but Virtual Iron's chief strategy officer Tony Asaro disagreed, stating that Virtual Iron has been a substantial contributor to the Xen project and Xen belongs to the open source community.

 

In an InternetNews.com report, Asaro was quoted as saying: “the dangerous thing Simon said is that Citrix owns the hypervisor. That's wrong; Citrix bought Xen and sells the Citrix commercial product and are the drivers or owners of the open source project, but it's the community that works on open source.”

 

Crosbie's “irresponsible statement about the open source community is counter to the philosophy of open source which he's the biggest proponent of,” Asaro added in the report.

 

He also dismissed another Crosbie comment, that Citrix is stronger in the storage area. He says that Virtual Iron supports iSCSI and Fiber Channel instead of Symantec's (News - Alert) Veritas host-based file system which runs on Citrix, "because we serve small and medium enterprises and they don't have a need for that."

 

This disagreement has drawn attention and comments from various analysts and observers.

 

Andi Mann, research director at Enterprise Management Associates stated, was quoted in the InternetNews.com report as saying, "It's true that Citrix owns XenSource, which is the keeper of the code, but Virtual Iron can do what they need to do down to the code level. I like Simon, but he's one to stir up emotions, and has slapfights with all sorts of people.”

 

Kevin Epstein, vice president of marketing for Scalent Systems, also was quoted in the report, saying: “Simon's saying there's a bunch of features they don't have that Citrix has, and Virtual Iron's saying 'we don't have those features but they're irrelevant to our market'.”

 

Epstein added: “In defense of Virtual Iron, different players will occupy different points in any business segment, but if you ask people at large who they think of when it comes to virtual machines, they'll say VMware, XenSource and Microsoft (News - Alert).”

 

Stephen Elliott, IDC analyst, was quoted in the report as saying that the fight is over market recognition. “Increasingly, what matters is which vendor has the marketing, channel and partner support to get into accounts at the right price point,” he said in the report. “Virtual Iron is still struggling to get known and get out of the small vendor perspective, and Citrix will likely be faced with a major strategic decision about XenServer as Microsoft provides a key and large revenue channel for the company.”