A Virtual Reality
August 22nd, 2007
I’m back on the road again, this time I’m heading to our corporate HQ in Redwood City for a series of management meetings and to spend time with Steve Shine, our new EVP of worldwide sales. Steve formerly ran European sales for Sybase and I believe he’s the perfect addition to our team. During the course of our meetings I’ll be demonstrating our new Icebreaker Business Intelligence Appliance and will be using virtualization software to allow me to create a sandbox in which I can highlight the simplicity of the installation process and demonstrate how quickly a novice user can get up and running with our solution. While virtualization software has been around since the sixties we’ve witnessed a dramatic resurgence in its use in the past couple of years. I believe that this is largely due to the fact that today’s machines provide significantly more horsepower than is required by the majority of users. For example, the laptop that I’m using this week is capable of supporting four or five separate virtual machines which allow me to seamlessly move between different Linux distros and even a Windows VM, if that’s what’s needed. I have separated my development and demonstration environments and can demonstrate different Ingres versions and products depending on the audience. IT departments are leveraging virtualization in the data center to consolidate multiple physical servers into a single system which results in significant cost savings in terms of hardware acquisition, and also in the cost of powering, managing and hosting the machines. Virtualization is revolutionizing how we’re using computers today and I believe that this was reflected in the success of the VMware IPO last week and the fact that Citrix have announced the acquisition of XenSource. Virtualization is also revolutionizing how software is developed, tested, deployed and supported. Virtualization technology is the perfect platform for deploying our Icebreaker software appliances, and you’ll see us package our solutions for staging on sites that host virtual machines such as http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/832.
