VMware

As the No. 3 executive at Microsoft, Paul Maritz presided over the company's Windows juggernaut, turned aside threats from Netscape and Sun Microsystems, and pressed the company to embrace the Internet. Now, the longtime software executive is looking down Microsoft's barrel from the other end, trying to help his new employer, VMware, triumph where past Microsoft competitors fell short.

VMware on Monday announced plans to bring virtualization to mobile phones through its new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP).

Built on technology it acquired from Trango Virtual Processors in October, VMware MVP aims to help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster. What's more, end users will be able to run multiple profiles -- for example, one for personal use and one for work use -- on the same phone.

IBM is getting in the cloud. After a string of announcements over the past few weeks from Citrix, Red Hat, VMware, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, Big Blue is launching an initiative to extend its traditional software delivery model toward a mix of on-premise and cloud-computing applications with new software, services and technical resources for clients and independent software vendors (ISVs).

VMware this week announced a string of new products with a single goal in mind: to expand its flagship virtual-infrastructure suite into a Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS).

VDC-OS aims to help businesses pool hardware resources -- servers, storage and network -- into an aggregated on-premises cloud, and to move workloads to external clouds for additional computing capacity when needed.

At VMworld 2008 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Nev., this week, VMWare unveiled software products for cloud, storage, management and virtualization-aware networks. The series of interrelated products emphasize integration of VMWare across the enterprise for a variety of services.

VMWare says this year's show will host more than 14,000 attendees and 206 vendors.

Zero Downtime

To spur the adoption of virtualization, VMware is offering its stand-alone ESXi hypervisor for free. ESXi was built to run virtual machines, minimizing configuration requirements and simplifying deployment, according to the company.

Leading server manufacturers have all embedded ESXi, including Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM and NEC.

VMware Inc. abruptly replaced co-founder Diane Greene as chief executive Tuesday and lowered its sales outlook, triggering alarms that pounded the business software maker's shares to their lowest depths since the company's lucrative public offering 11 months ago.

Former Microsoft Corp. executive Paul Maritz took over as VMware's new leader. In the past few months, Maritz had been running a division of VMware's controlling shareholder, data storage specialist EMC Corp.