Paul Maritz

Cisco Systems, NetApp and VMware are joining forces to bring new design architectures to market. The goal is to develop virtualized data centers that are more efficient, dynamic and secure.

The trio on Tuesday introduced an end-to-end Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture that works to beef up security in cloud environments by isolating the IT resources and applications of different clients, business units, or departments that share a common IT infrastructure.

Microsoft's No. 1 rival is a household name, Google. But a strong candidate for No. 2 is a company scarcely known outside the technology industry: VMware.

"VMware is definitely a threat," said Gary Chen, an analyst at IDC, a research firm. "After Google, it is the company Microsoft fears most."

Google and VMware, which is based in Palo Alto, California, pose a broadly similar challenge to Microsoft, by potentially undermining the dominance of its most lucrative desktop software and operating systems. Google represents the attack from above, while VMware is the assault from beneath.

VMware has all but closed the deal to acquire SpringSource in a $420 million cash and stock transaction. The idea is to offer new solutions that help companies build, run and manage applications within internal and external cloud architectures more efficiently.

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.

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.

VMware warned customers this week that it had discovered what amounted to a virtual bomb ticking down within the latest builds of ESX. Its ESX is a "bare-metal" hypervisor for enterprise applications that partitions physical servers into multiple virtual machines, each of which represents a complete system containing processors, memory, networking, storage and BIOS.

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.