Microsoft’s plan to rout out VMware

Storage Mojo takes a quick look at the WPC talk of Kevin Turner, MSFT’s COO and here’s the transcript snippet which might interest the readers:

Now let’s talk about virtualization. And the Microsoft partners in the room that have adopted our Hyper-V and our virtualization story, this is for you. For the partners in the room that haven’t entered the virtualization business, this is for you. The partners in the room that are selling VMware versus us, just please tune out during this segment because we want to take your market share.

We launched this product in October of last year. Since October of last year, we’re at over 24 points of market share from the day we put it in the marketplace. Loving that. Loving that. (Applause.) The R2 product that we’ve got coming out gives us the one thing, the one friction point that we hear from our customers, and that is this ability on live migration. V Motion, we’re giving them live migration with R2 and keeping the same value proposition.

And so I hear a lot about margins, hey, the VMware program’s got higher margins. Well, if I charged you US$58,000, I’d give you higher margins too. That’s not what we charge customers. We charge them US$9600 and that’s why our margins are what they are. So, as you line up to make your bets, if you want to bet against us in this particular space, we’re coming right at you. And I encourage you to partner with us and take a look at the program because we’ve got an incredible solution. 100 percent of what we’re putting in our Microsoft datacenters today is virtualized using our product. And so we’re very, very excited about what we do.

And just like we did with Apple, and I’ll cover that in a moment, we’re going to get this virtualization tax, the VMware tax out there and start driving people crazy with the value proposition. We took 24 points of market share, with a product as you can see in the center column that had lots of things that VMware didn’t have.

And I’ve tried to be very, very candid and honest with this comparison so that there’s nobody in the room thinking we have our head in the sand and we don’t understand our opportunity or where they’re better than us. We do. And Bob Muglia and his team are committed to it. And we’re just going to keep improving the product and keep growing the market share.

But this is a space we’re not going to lose in, ladies and gentlemen, and so as you think about where to put your investments, we encourage you to take a hard look at our value proposition because we want our customers to pay less and get more and the ability to build solutions around that stack is an incredible partnership opportunity that you have.

Mojo points out correctly as memory/RAM gets cheaper, it will be worthless to find angles within “the box” where crude realities of building a True Unified Computing , where consumption resources –I won’t even call them memory, cpu etc as I call them VirtBulk in my talks on Cloud computing (see slide for more details) –are merely at the bottom most layer of your business.

2010 will be truly deciding as Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle, Parallels, IBM, Novell all will show their virtualwares in full “Just Enough Computing” ready. More business will be created as SMBs will join the race and it is highly unlikely that SMBs will not be touched by Microsoft’s Hyper-V. These days I am practically confronted by every customer who has been running MSFT’s Virtual Server but since Hyper-V is/was not ready enough, folks chose for VMware.

Link to MSFT’s WPC and Storage Mojo’s take

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