In these troubled times, Citrix’s latest offering – announced in advance of VMworld Europe in 2009 – which opens tomorrow in Cannes – could generate a huge interest. The company just announced that its Hypervisor, XenServer, and all its advanced features such as the XenCenter administration console, the live migration feature of the management of server pools will now be 100% free…
Such a strategy could be interpreted as a desperate move if Xenserver was a bad product. But Citrix’s hypervisor is far from being ridiculous compared with its main competitors, ESX Server and Hyper-V. In fact, its performance is great, the software is quite easy to install, use and manage, and it provides nice features in terms of management and Storage management. Better yet, the latest release of the software, scheduled for the end of March should bring more advanced features and better performance.
How will Citrix win money in these conditions and is such a model sustainable ? As for money, Citrix intends to monetize the hypervisor with enterprise support contracts, a model already used with success by open source companies. The company also intends to sell a number of tools around his core hypervisor, notably a new automation and high availability tool, Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V (an alternative to VMware Lab Manager), and an orchestration tool, Citrix Workflow Studio. Another – more indirect -way to monetize XenServer, will be to make it a core infrastructure component of other paying products, like XenDesktop (Desktop virtualization).
Of course the simple fact that XenServer is now free will not bring down overnight VMware’s domination of the virtualization market. Notably because many companies have already multi-year contracts in place with VMware. But in these times of belt tightening, it might give ideas to people who, for some use cases, could wonder why they should pay such a high price for features that Citrix now offers for free …
