Citrix: why open source virtualisation goes up from the client

A year after buying XenSource, Citrix has evolved its marketing strategy for the Xen open source hypervisor.

Virtualisation will be more about application delivery in the long term, and rival VMware will be limited by its server consolidation focus, Citrix experts told me on a briefing day last week, at the company's UK headquarters.

I had detailed briefings on Xen from Simon Crosby, Citrix CTO and founder of XenSource, and a meeting with Ian Pratt, the Cambridge professor who manages the Xen.org project and is also director of future products at Citrix.

All this took place in an 18th century mansion that also featured in the James Bond movie Thunderball. We were lectured in the room where he was almost killed by a physiotherapy machine - and found the experience only slightly less stretching.

The application delivery part is no surprise - that's the focus Citrix had before it absorbed Xensource. But that, and the fact that Xen is open source, will trump rival VMware said Crosby.

VMware is forced to keep value in the the hypervisor, Crosby argues, and in the job of server consolidation. That pushes VMware to try and annex the server management role, with specialist virtualisation technicians doing a job that should be done better by products like Tivoli or OpenView.

Being open source, Xen's impact on the market - and its market share - is very hard to establish. Crosby and Pratt both spoke of large numbers of "cloud" providers building business systems on the free version of Xen.

Overall, they argue that a strong story around application delivery to the client will make Xen indispensable in the server room - and the cloud part of the story suits it to the future evolution of IT.

Apps are supposedly migrating to third party cloud providers - if the IT department and the cloud provider both use Xen, this could be a matter of just moving a VM across.

There's plenty more to say onb this subject, but it was a very interesting. day.