BlueStacks’ App Player for Windows launched in public alpha on Oct. 11, giving Windows users the chance to play Android apps full screen for the first time. The software, which allows users to resize Android apps at no resolution loss without additional work from developers, has been downloaded in 100 countries, the company said, though it declined to say how many users have signed up.

The new funding will help support this community of users and accelerate development of the product. BlueStacks said a beta will be released later this year and a pro version with access to premium apps like Fruit Ninja and Cut the Rope will be launched by the end of the year. BlueStacks is also working with PC makers to include App Player for Windows on new machines.

The App Player is finding a lot of support, from 100,000 Facebook fans to Android developers who are excited about reaching PC users with their software. And now it looks like AMD and Citrix are also interested in the prospects of BlueStacks virtualization software. Citrix, for example, said it sees an opportunity in applying BlueStacks technology in enterprise IT while AMD said BlueStacks can work with AMD-equipped tablets and PCs, allowing Android apps to tap the horsepower of AMD for their apps.

The rise of BlueStacks is an example of the convergence of mobile and desktop, as the line between the platforms blur over time. Though we’ve talked of the post-PC era, the fact is that PCs will be around for a while and innovations like App Player for Windows show how computers can work alongside mobile devices and participate in the momentum behind mobile apps.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Flash analysis: Steve Jobs

Stephen Herrod - CTO, VMware at Mobilize 2011

VMware has signed deals with Verizon and Telefonica to offer its mobile virtualization products on phones provided by the operators. The net result of this deal is that employees who want to combine their work phone and their personal phone will soon be able to do so with the aid of the VMware Horizon software on their phones.

As is usual when dealing with mobile operators and corporate IT, some caveats apply. So far only Android devices will work with the Horizon hypervisor with VMware unable to offer the benefits of a hypervisor-enabled virtualization on Apple’s iOS devices including the iPad and iPhone for Verizon. Steve Herrod, the CTO of VMware, said in an interview that’s he’s happy to do it when Apple decided to let others play around with its operating system. Meanwhile he reiterated that eventually he hopes to get VMware’s Horizon product written into the Android code.

While he’s thinking big, he also avoided stealing the carriers’ thunder. So he couldn’t tell me when Verizon or Telefonica would launch the dual-mode devices, or much about how they planned to price it or sell it. He did say that Telefonica planned to offer it as a service for corporate clients, which means that Telefonica will host the management software that will control the access to the corporate side of the phone and offer it as a service for enterprise clients. Telefonica will also be offering two phone numbers for one phone, although Verizon will not.

So far Verizon will offer the service on LG phones, although VMware also has a partnership to put its hypervisor on Samsung devices as well. When asked, Herrod said he expected more partners to be announced before carriers actually launch the service. The hypervisor has to be put onto the devices before they ship from the manufacturer, although a user doesn’t have to enable it. For more on the use cases associated with having a virtualized mobile phone, check out the conversation I had with Herrod during Mobilize.

Essentially it gives the user one device, while giving the corporate bosses a sense of control and security around what apps, data and information can be accessed and stored on the device. Herrod claims that the software has “minimal, if any” impact on the phone’s battery life or responsiveness.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future

Anyone following VMware is likely familiar with the mobile virtualization plans it laid out at its VMworld event last month. Essentially, the company wants to enable the consumerization trend by virtualizing mobile devices like its technology already does for servers and desktops, and then delivering applications designed to run natively on these new form factors such as tablets and smartphones. This effort falls under the product banner of Horizon Mobile, which Herrod describes at a high level as providing a dual persona for devices — one for personal use and one for corporate use.

A key component of VMware’s strategy is its partnership arrangement with both Samsung and LG to incorporate the hypervisor into the versions of the Android operating system that they’ve developed to run on their handsets. When the partnerships finally bear fruit, all of the manfacturers’ Android devices will come with this feature, meaning that an employee just needs to show to work with his device and let IT get the enterprise-centric virtual machine up and running. But, Herrod said today, VMware is also working with Google to get its virtualization hooks incorporated into the core Android that Google puts out and that manufacturers like Samsung, LG and others modify for their specific devices.

That could be a huge deal for VMware, as Android devices account for almost 50 percent of all devices, according to recent estimates. Getting its technology incorporated into the Android OS coming straight from Google would make VMware the de facto mobile virtualization option, and would save it the hassle of having to neccesarily strike deals with every single device maker. It’s difficult to gauge how many mobile devices VMware might find itself on compared with the number of servers it virtualizes in data centers, but Herrod himself provided some insight into the potential: he said he access five devices per day and had three on his person at the event.

The elephant in the room, though, is Apple’s iOS, which probably represents the most disruptive force in the consumerization of IT thanks to its presence on iPads and iPhones. VMware certainly could virtualize iOS devices, Herrod said, but one can imagine that Apple isn’t too keen on the idea of having Android apps running on its devices. Technologically, there aren’t many hurdles, but business issues still can jam the works. VMware isn’t about to lose out on the power of iOS altogether, though. Today, for example, it rolled out versions of its SlideRocket and Socialcast applications designed for iPads.

The result of all the technological wrangling, Herrod explained, is a litany of options around how users might go about managing their split-personality devices. You’ll have to watch a replay of Herrod’s discussion to get the whole story, but Herrod made it sound like the possibilities are almost endless in terms of intelligently separating business use from personal use.

Interestingly, Cisco’s Tom Gillis noted in an earlier Mobilize session that putting a hypervisor on the phone isn’t an ideal solution to consumerization security because it will result in too high a performance hit. VMware has claimed its technology minimally affects performance, and even that is mitigated to some degree by running apps specially designed to run in that environment.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• A Global Mobile Handset Platform Forecast, 2011 – 2015

The gist of the problem, by Gillis’s thinking, is that work has become something that we do rather than a place that we go. That means a firewall that simply allows access to data from internal sources while shutting out external sources is fast becoming an antiquated solution because there’s no definite beginning or end to the corporate network. Now, Gillis explained, traffic is coming from everywhere and on a variety of different devices, which means security products need to learn some new tricks.

Among the highest-priority new capabilities might be wrapping corporate data in security protocols that safeguard in dynamic manners beyond what traditional firewalls do. For example, consumerization-inspired security methods will have to recognize who has access to data without necessarily relying on the IP address of a specific physical server. It could just as easily be any number of virtual machines or mobile devices from which employees or applications are legitimately trying to gain access.

But although it’s hard work trying to solve security for consumerization (and, to a lesser degree, virtualization), Gillis thinks it’s critical that security vendors and IT departments try to do so. For one, he said, consumerization is going to happen regardless whether companies allow it. In this regard, it’s similar to how Amazon Web Services instances and VMware virtual machines started popping up all over enterprises without consent from above. The best bet, Gillis said, is to embrace the trend and figure out a way to make it secure. It’s “almost absurd” at this point to be the guy who says no, he added.

And when it’s all said and done, companies will likely have happier employees. Gillis noted that employee satisfaction among his team within Cisco skyrocketed when employees were allowed to use their own Macs instead of the company-issued Windows machines, despite the fact that employees had to pay for and service Macs out of their own pockets.

Gillis thinks virtualization might be the trick to solving security for consumerization, but he sees plenty of work still to be done. Right now, he explained, “there’s a gap … that needs to be filled” between delivering enterprise applications to devices via virtual-desktop-like methods and putting a hypervisor right on the device to separate it into a personal VM and a corporate VM. The former creates problems around display and functionality, especially if you’re talking about putting Windows apps on non-Windows devices, and the latter can be a serious performance hindrance, Gillis said.

VMware, which announced a mobile virtualization and application-delivery strategy at VMworld last month, might take some issue with Gillis’s assessment of the situation.

Whatever path companies take to solve these problems, though, Gillis said whoever can do it will be in a good position to lead the security market going forward. It’s like a NASCAR race, he analogized, where we’re heading into a blind corner and whoever best maneuvers it will come out ahead.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

Most discussions of enterprise mobility focus exclusively on the benefits of giving mobile workers access to corporate data, networks and applications. In theory, that means making workers more productive while saving on capital equipment costs. In practice, enterprise mobility often forces a choice between corporate security, or worker productivity and personal freedom.

Mobile workers around the world increasingly prefer to use their own smartphones, tablets, and other wireless devices for both professional and personal communications and computing. This consumerization of enterprise IT, a natural consequence of smartphone and mobile applications growth, puts new pressures on companies to accommodate and secure employee-owned mobile devices.

Historically, IT security concerns have resulted in employee mobile devices running the RIM (BlackBerry) operating system or Microsoft Windows variants as the primary “supported” mobile devices in corporate environments. However, the overwhelming popularity of new devices including the iPhone, iPad and a wide range of Android smartphones has resulted in employees increasingly sneaking their own personal devices into the workplace.

A number of technical and process-based approaches are commercially available to address requirements for enterprise mobility security. Currently, enterprise IT looks to Mobile Device Management (MDM) and endpoint security technologies such as encryption and anti-virus software, to bolster enterprise mobility. These technologies are necessary and powerful, but leave critical requirements unmet. In particular, MDM and endpoint security rely on the integrity of the underlying smartphone operating system (OS) and software stack, which are still vulnerable to exploits. Even the security software that protects the device may be susceptible, threatening both the integrity of the mobile device and any information that passes through it.

Many of these company-imposed restrictions also make mobile devices too cumbersome for personal use, limiting productivity and increasing corporate vulnerability as users ditch the proper procedures. Implementing enterprise security policy usually entails restrictions on freedom to fully use the capabilities of the device (e.g., blacklisting online destinations, curtailing application download and use). The unfortunate result is that employees continue to carry a second, personal device, leaving many benefits of enterprise mobility unrealized.

Enter mobile virtualization

In data centers, virtualization separates the hardware from the software running on it, allowing for consolidation of separate, disparate physical systems into multiple virtual machines on one server. Mobile virtualization effects a similar consolidation by merging multiple dedicated embedded processors onto a single CPU.

Mobile virtualization provides a secure, isolated and robust run-time environment for programs (including operating systems), which is indistinguishable from actual “bare metal” hardware. This environment is called a virtual machine (VM). The virtual machines can become a container for guest software, imitating computer hardware and isolating guests from one another. Providing the virtual machine environment and managing VM resources is a software layer called a hypervisor.

Enterprise desktop virtualization programs are typically application-level (Type II) hypervisors: They let users run additional OSes and applications, such as Windows on MacOS, or Linux on Windows. But, to be effective and truly secure, mobile virtualization should employ Type I hypervisors, “bare metal” technology comparable to blade and server virtualization in the enterprise data center.

Not all Type I hypervisors are created equal. Some mobile virtualization platforms offer superior performance and finer granularity than others. A smaller trusted compute base and stricter hardware-enforced separation among virtual machines assures a more secure mobile virtualization solution. The fine-grained “capabilities” available with some hypervisors make it easier for integrators and architects to configure and control communication among virtual machines, without compromising performance or security.

Such fine-grained control allows mobile system designers to expose select characteristics of a shared devices (e.g., a sound chip or wireless interface) giving one trusted guest OS full read/write permissions to it, but more restricted access to a second untrusted guest, either directly or through a virtual device driver. Access controls like these are fast and hardware-enforced using processor-based memory management, and impose little or no power consumption or response-time overhead.

Mobile virtualization software itself (a microvisor), also imposes minimal cost in the software bill of materials of a smartphone or other mobile device, and, in fact, can substantially reduce those costs in three ways. First, consolidating multiple CPUs onto a single chipset saves on silicon. Second, systems with fewer hardware components cost less to test and are inherently more reliable, improving manufacturing yields and margins. Third, fewer components draw less power, allowing use of smaller, cheaper batteries or letting users squeeze more life and talk time.

These savings are more than just “cost shavings.” – Tear-downs from OK Labs and industry analysts show that mobile hardware consolidation can yield savings of upwards of $65 on total device expenses of $150-$250. Such steep cost reduction improves margins, makes smart devices more accessible, and even opens new segments for affordable “mass market” smartphones.

Dump the dual-phone lifestyle

Effective enterprise mobility rests on three pillars: security, privacy, and freedom to fully use the capabilities of the device. Of the various options for implementing enterprise mobility securely while preserving end-user privacy and freedom, only mobile virtualization consistently balances all three pillars. Other solutions attempt to implement the form of dual persona functionality, but miss the substance of underlying security, and of preserving privacy and freedom.

Mobile virtualization lets enterprise IT secure access to enterprise assets and services, while ensuring user privacy and preserving intact smartphone user experience. All on a single off-the-shelf smartphone or tablet! And, mobile virtualization lets users adopt the mobile device of their choice, while allowing corporate IT departments to manage sensitive data on those devices with enterprise-level security and compliance.

Steve Subar is founder and CEO of Open Kernel Labs.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• VMware’s Cloudy Ambitions: Can It Repeat Hypervisor Success?

Coming soon, a phone for work and play.

ARM’s new Eagle processor core is pretty darn exciting. Who wouldn’t want five times the performance at the same power consumption as today’s chips? Plus, with the success of the iPhone and iPad, more and more software is now written for ARM chips, meaning that the x86 software advantage is waning, especially for consumers. In the Eagle announcement, ARM supports virtualization on a chip, something most folks associate with servers, but it will soon change the way you handle your phone.

The benefits of virtualizing a mobile phone were laid out in a Texas Instruments blog (TI licences ARM cores for its application processors inside phones):

Hardware virtualization opens up a whole new opportunity to efficiently take advantage of multiple, simultaneous operating environments. This could be used to support independent corporate and personal environments or multiple operating systems that provide unique experiences or services. VirtualLogix gave a glimpse of this future mobile virtualization this week by showcasing three mobile operating systems (Android 2.2, ChromeOS and Ubuntu Linux) running simultaneously on the TI OMAP 4 Blaze™ mobile development platform (MDP). By leveraging the Cortex-A15 hardware support, the virtualization experience can be enhanced with improved performance and security.

Since the phone is the new computer, and folks seem unwilling to carry two of the things around (not to mention they’re expensive to buy service for), one big promise of virtualization is toting your work life and your personal life on one handset–or iPad. We’ve all experienced the pain of having a work and personal laptop and trying to synch files between them, and IT departments are currently trying to handle the influx of personal phones in the office, so creating a controllable “office-safe” environment on a handset is promising. How promising? Well, earlier this week, Red Bend Software bought VirtualLogix, a company that makes a hypervisor for phones, in order to make handset virtualization palatable for enterprises. TI was an investor in VirtualLogix.

With faster chips built on the latest ARM processor — and the proliferation of smartphone-toting executives and middle managers who no longer want to weigh down their pockets and purses with a BlackBerry and an iPhone– the virtualization hooks built into the Eagle core are pretty sweet. For those wondering, VMware, the original hypervisor, has an interest in virtualizing handsets, too. There’s also a lot of promise in using virtualization to take feature phones up a notch to give them app stores or smartphone-like functionality. HipLogic, which has raised money from Bay Partners and Benchmark Capital, provides such a service with its virtualization software. For more on this topic, check out our panel at our upcoming Mobilize Event in San Francisco, where folks from VMware and RedBend Software will lay out the future of your virtualized handset.

Related GigaOM Pro Research (sub req’d): For Phones, the Future Is Multiple Cores

At that point, the value of server virtualization will go down substantially. This fact is not lost on virtualization leader VMware, whose CEO Paul Maritz, less than two years after joining, has positioned the company to cannibalize its own server virtualization business with a move toward platform-as-a-service computing.

At Structure 2010, Maritz said that “clouds at the infrastructure layer are the new hardware.” The unit of cloud scaling today is the virtual server. When you go to Amazon’s EC2 you buy capacity by the virtual server instance hour. This will change in the next phase of the evolution of cloud computing. We are already starting to see the early signs of this transformation with Google App Engine, which has automatic scaling built in, and Heroku with its notion of dynos and workers as the units of scalability.

Developers working on top of Google App Engine and Heroku never have to think about servers, virtual or physical. In a few years, clouds at the application platform layer will be the new hardware. At that time, traditional operating systems and server virtual machines will become much less important to the cloud.

First and foremost, server virtualization generates overhead. VMware performance tests suggest that the overhead is in the 8 to 12 percent range. However, when several virtual machines run on the same server and start competing for hardware and network resources, the overhead is substantially higher. This is waste. It’s expensive. It’s bad for the environment.

Some would argue that this is a necessary, small overhead that provides security and enables great efficiencies in the data center. That’s true in the sense that without virtualization there is no easy way to take many enterprise applications architected in the 80s and 90s, bolted onto a Windows or Linux operating system and relying on resources such as files and sockets, and make them securely run on one physical server. The argument fails, however, when applied to most modern applications, which rely on network-accessible resources such as databases and Web services as opposed to local resources such as files and processes.

Aiding this trend, startups are building custom application virtualization layers that free applications from servers, obviating the need for virtualizing Windows or full-featured Linux OSes. At Structure, Tom Mornini, CTO of Engine Yard, and I spent a fascinating part of an hour with pen and paper drawing diagrams of what the new software stack looks like. Although Engine Yard’s scaling model is still focused on servers, this is an indication of their enterprise go-to-market strategy. Enterprises are still much more comfortable thinking and buying in terms of servers.

Right now, many PaaS companies deploy on virtualized servers because they are small startups that don’t own their own hardware. In the very near future, when a large cloud provider such as Amazon offers a PaaS, that provider will have the option to deploy at least a meaningful portion of the PaaS workloads of their customers against machines running a lean, stripped OS and/or a tiny hypervisor providing the barest minimum isolation from the hardware and no server virtualization layer the way the term is understood today. Multi-tenancy isolation will be achieved at the platform-as-a-service layer, not at the virtual machine layer.

The biggest hindrance to deploying these types of PaaS offerings on public clouds is trust — something Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, emphasized in a conversation. Right now AWS trusts the server virtualization tier to provide security and isolation. Technically, this is not harder to do at the PaaS layer. In fact, it is easier — you just have to remove or trap dangerous APIs — but I expect it will still take at least a year or two before the volume of PaaS usage makes it worthwhile for large public cloud providers to go through the effort of eliminating server virtualization overhead.

Enterprise private clouds will need server virtualization for a while, but I expect that market to peak in three years and then begin a steady decline brought about by the commoditization of basic server virtualization we are already seeing and the shift of new development to PaaS. The same will happen with traditional server operating systems. It’s not a question of if, but when.

A year after Maritz took over the reins, VMware bought SpringSource, which offered an application framework, server and management tools with a significant following in the Java developer community. Partnerships with Google around App Engine and Salesforce.com around VMforce quickly followed — putting VMware in the Java PaaS game. VMware has seen the future clearly and is preparing to move up the stack to PaaS offerings.

This was spelled out in May by VMware CTO Steve Herrod: “We are committed to making Spring the best language for cloud applications, even if that cloud is not based on VMware vSphere.” Recently, GigaOM reported that VMware may be talking to Engine Yard, the Ruby on Rails PaaS provider. Whether a deal happens or not, I’m impressed by VMware’s bold approach under Maritz.

Soon we will be able to throw away the server virtualization crutch and, like in that memorable moment from Forrest Gump, we will be able to run leaner and more scalable applications in the cloud on next-generation platforms-as-a-service. For the time being, my call to action is for application developers to stop writing code that directly touches any hardware or operating system objects and try the current generation of platforms-as-a-service.

Simeon Simeonov is founder and CEO of FastIgnite, an executive-in-residence at General Catalyst Partners and co-founder of Better Advertising and Thing Labs. He tweets as @simeons.

As I describe in detail in my research note on GigaOM Pro (sub required), the new products –- Cloud Insight, Cloud Compose, Cloud Optimize and Cloud Orchestrate –- attempt to simplify decision-making by letting organizations know what services are available to them and which of their physical, virtual or cloud-based resources are for hosting them. The products complement CA’s infrastructure-management tools, which now support Cisco UCS and provisioning in Amazon Web Services. With these products, CA has set the bar for how management software must act within cloud-connected organizations. It must recognize resources of all types, understand that some services will be hosted elsewhere, and somehow enable users to make sense of it all.

Of course, evolution happens fast in cloud computing, and there’s no telling what the competitive landscape will look like once the products start becoming available in the fourth quarter of this year. Competitors — be they systems-management vendors like IBM, or virtualization vendors like VMware, or both, like Microsoft — fully understand the cloud market (some played integral roles in shaping it, in fact), and they could invest in research or acquisitions to match CA’s service-focused approach to cloud computing. CA might have more innovations up its sleeve, too, which will just serve to up the value proposition for its products. Furthermore, the company maintains partnerships with vendors like VMware and Microsoft around their hypervisors, so customers might be able to build best-of-breed virtualized environments.

However, the success of CA’s approach actually might hinge on the success of the Carnegie Mellon University-led SMI Consortium and the Cloud Commons, two new entities backed by CA and on which which its new software rely heavily. SMI stands for “Service Management Index,” which is a matrix of six factors against which cloud services are rated. Cloud Commons contains SMI rating for thousands of cloud services, as well as qualitative data from experts and users, and CA Cloud Insight compiles SMI ratings for internal services to compare against what’s available in the cloud. It will be interesting to see what happens if neither efforts catches on before the first of CA’s products hits shelves in the fourth quarter, or if competitors latch onto both and incorporate them into their own virtualization- and cloud-management offerings.

Read my full report for in-depth product, competitive and roadmap analysis, and attend Structure 2010 to hear how the rest of the software industry is tackling the cloud.

Photo courtesy CA Technologies.

A Big Winner: Salesforce.com

As I wrote last week, the combination of SaaS and PaaS could prove to be powerful, and Salesforce.com was poised to capitalize on this if it only expanded its Force.com user base. Enter VMforce. Now, Salesforce.com can bring in a new — and much, much larger — developer community to build applications atop Force.com. Once they’re in, the hope is that the hooks into Salesforce.com’s various collaboration, support and SaaS tools will make them want to stay, and maybe even expand into Salesforce.com’s other services.

The Biggest Winner: VMware

I suspect VMforce represents a mere seed from which will sprout a vast PaaS empire. If VMware expands its PaaS partnerships beyond Salesforce.com – in the manner it has grown its vCloud ecosystem -– users will be able to port both VMs and code from on-premise environments into the cloud, and then across a variety of cloud providers’ services. The one piece that makes all this flexibility possible: VMware. VMware also is facing an all-out assault on the virtualization front, and rather than battling simultaneously with Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle and Red Hat, it’s changing the nature of the conflict. If it were a matter of comparing apples to apples, customers would face a difficult choice, but VMware is trying to show them they can have an entire fruit basket.

The Biggest Loser: Oracle

Compared with Oracle, Salesforce.com now looks even more appealing as a SaaS option, and VMware looks more appealing as both a virtualization and Java platform option. IBM hasn’t gone anywhere either, and is pushing its cloud offerings hard. Even Microsoft enables Java development on Windows Azure, as does Google on App Engine. Oracle said it won’t be pursuing Sun’s cloud ambitions, but it might be time to rethink those plans, at least in terms of a PaaS offering.

Read the full article here, and be sure to attend Structure 2010 in June, where we’ll certainly here more about VMforce from keynote speakers Paul Maritz and Marc Benioff.

Two-year-old startup VMOps of Cupertino, Calif., has developed software that in essence allows companies to deploy an equivalent of Amazon’s elastic computing (EC2) service using commodity hardware to build their own private cloud. Furthermore, VMOps allows its customers to use any type of virtual machine — Microsoft’s HyperV, Xensource, VMware — and any operating system software for a VMOps-based private cloud.

VMOps was started by Sheng Liang, former VP of engineering at SEVEN Networks. Liang also sold his application firewall company, Teros Networks, to Citrix, and worked on the team that developed the Java Virtual Machine.

VMOps has two main products: VMOps Cloud Management Server and VMOps Multitenant Hypervisor. And according to my sources, it’s getting a lot of attention from potential customers, which include mid-tier telecom companies such as XO Communications and Tata Communications. Others are also said to be kicking the tires on its products.

This early traction helps to explain why the company is in the process of closing a $11 million Series B round, which was apparently led by Index Ventures and includes investments from previous investors Satish Dharmraj of Redpoint Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners.

Index Ventures’ is the new investor in this round, with Mike Volpi, formerly of Joost and Cisco, leading a $6.5 million infusion as part of it. I wonder if Volpi’s old carrier connections are helping open doors for the company at telcos and data centers. VMOps is said to have raised a total of $17.6 million in prior two rounds of funding.

One thing is for sure: That pile of cash gives VMOps enough cushion to fine-tune its offering as it starts to compete with the likes of VMware’s vCloud and Eucalyptus, for this is going to be a fiercely contested marketplace. Eucalyptus, which raised $5.5 million in April 2009, is using its open source roots to find a role for itself. VMOps, on the other hand, is betting that its Swiss approach to virtual machines and operating systems is going to give it a leg up, especially against the deep-pocketed VMware.

Related GigaOM Pro Research:

• Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?
• VMware Tightens Its Strangehold, But Competitors Are Still Breathing

From the early days of development of its Unix-based operating system to its battles with purportedly Orwellian companies like IBM and Microsoft to the jeans-wearing corporate culture it has always nurtured, Apple has always had an easy time wooing the freewheeling computing counterculture, including the open source community. In recent years, though, even as it has (deservedly) earned “company of the decade” accolades, Apple has become more and more closed.

Tom Foremski recently noted that Apple is actually becoming more closed with every new device it delivers. As he writes:

“Since the introduction of the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad, Apple is becoming less and less open, it is using fewer standard components and chips, and far fewer Internet technologies common to Mac/PC desktop and laptop systems.”

Foremski also notes that Apple’s upcoming iPad is “a much more closed system than any of Apple’s products from the past 10 years.” It runs only the A4 processor — a chip that other companies can’t buy. It runs a restrictive, non-multitasking operating system: the iPhone OS. Even its connectivity is very limited, and, presumably, ongoing dongles and hardware connectivity options for it will be available mostly just from Apple. Citing “zero-sum maneuvering against hated rivals,” the Wall Street Journal recently took the iPad to task for not supporting common platforms such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight (locking users into iTunes-only content).

Picking up the thread, newly crowned Canonical COO and open source blogger Matt Asay wonders if Apple is the new Microsoft. He asks whether “Apple is the company that creates insanely great business strategies for locking customers into its walled-garden content emporium.”

Proprietary strategies have paid off big time for Apple. Its revenues exploded and its stock soared even as many people questioned its closed practices with the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone. But I predict that the iPad, aggressively closed as it is, will illustrate the folly of remaining strictly closed over the long run.

On a tablet-style device as slick as the iPad is, people will not be content with only the types of applications made available thus far for the iPhone. In fact, Om has predicted that we may see brand new types of applications and web sites crop up specifically for the iPad. If the device becomes popular, people will clamor for an open development environment, and, as I’ve pointed out, they will reach beyond the iPhone OS on the iPad by virtualizing other operating systems that extend to more applications.

As one reader of my post on Citrix’s virtualization software, which will let iPad users run Windows 7 applications, pointed out, “Most of the REAL work I do happens on remote servers that I access remotely through Citrix.” That’s not true for everyone, but, indeed, there are numerous bridges that require no virtualization that iPad users will take advantage of to reach for cloud-based applications. They’ll use applications in the cloud in the same way that users of Google’s Chrome OS will. What they won’t do is just lie down and accept total OS and application lock-down from Apple.

Years ago, when Apple delivered Boot Camp, which allows many Mac users to dual-boot the Mac OS with Microsoft Windows, some observers argued that Hell had frozen over. It hadn’t, though. Apple had no choice but to open its kimono and make a Windows-friendly move in a world teeming with virtualization options. Virtualization was arriving for free in other operating systems.

And that’s exactly the kind of free, open trend that will increasingly foil Apple if it doesn’t pursue more open policies. Virtualization and cloud computing will both, increasingly, usher in a world where it’s commonplace to run multiple operating systems, opening up robust types of choices in applications. Google’s Chrome OS embraces all of this so fully that its users will run all their applications in the cloud.  In the epic square-off between Apple and Google, Google is embracing openness much more than Apple is, and is making lots of money. Open source guru Dana Blankenhorn has noted that Red Hat’s new operating system, virtualization and open cloud initiatives — delivered this week — stand a good chance of stripping away proprietary advantages pursued by Microsoft and Oracle.

Free, open tools will arrive for circumventing and complementing Apple’s proprietary platforms. They’ll function as detours around oppressive  obstructions. I’ve heard the arguments against this, such as “Apple designs beautiful products that just work together, and that’s what users want” and “Apple is making tons of money with closed practices” and so on. The company does have to open its policies and practices, though, even as its closed moves keep causing cash registers to ring. Otherwise, new products that reach out to multiple operating systems and much larger appscapes will arrive. And tech  history has shown that he who delivers the largest appscape wins.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Djenan.

Related GigaOM Pro Research (sub req’d):

With the iPad, Apple Takes Google to the Mat

As Citrix vice president Chris Fleck has noted in a blog post:

“It turns out the 9.7 inch display on the iPad with a 1024×768 screen resolution works great for a full VDI XenDesktop. Windows applications run unmodified and securely in the data center, and even multiple applications at once. The advancements that were made for the Citrix Receiver for iPhone will carry over to the iPad, however the iPhone restrictions of screen size and small keyboards are overcome with the iPad. It’s a beautiful thing!”

One of the primary details to note there is that multiple Windows 7 applications can run in a session on an iPad via Citrix Receiver and Xen virtualization. Of course, it’s also important to note that Fleck is describing applications housed on remote servers — not running locally. Apple has already announced that it will have its iWork applications available for the iPad, but why won’t many Windows 7-centric users and businesses want access to Windows applications that they can run concurrently as well? Doing so could eliminate multitasking limitations inherent to the iPhone OS, and a larger screen than the iPhone’s will only help encourage such usage.

PC World’s Randall Kennedy argues that the iPad’s limited connectivity and lack of a keyboard and a mouse will keep many business users from adopting it, even if it does Windows 7 sessions. I, too, have expressed my doubts about whether Apple will even market the iPad toward business users, and many Windows 7 users may favor Windows tablets over the iPad. Still, the more I think about it, the more it seems inevitable that the iPad, through virtualization, will reach out to other operating systems featuring myriad types of applications.

Also, why stop at Windows? Many businesses run on Linux platforms with robust virtualization options. Lots of Linux users are used to running Linux in conjunction with other operating systems, and they may reach for virtualization as a way to extend what their iPads can do, too. Despite its cloud-centric focus, users of Google’s upcoming Linux-based Chrome OS may end up wanting to add virtualized sessions to their iPad arsenals, too, especially because of the strong security it promises to have.

Years ago, virtualization implied performance hits and other problems that made it impractical for many users, but that has changed. Even though the iPhone OS doesn’t include it natively, the writing is already on the wall that other players will deliver virtualized solutions for the iPad. They’ll be available for free, too. One of the key drivers for all of this is that, as always,  rich applications are what solidify the future of hardware devices. For that reason alone, the iPad will reach out to other operating systems — and apps for them –whether Apple likes it or not.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

Server virtualization uses virtual machines (VMs) to segment a single physical compute server into multiple logical virtual servers. In many environments, collapsing multiple overpowered physical servers onto a single server running multiple VMs can reap significant economic rewards.  A single server consumes less power, take up less space, may be easier to manage and allows for the dynamic creation and removal of VMs on demand.

VMs can be used inside an enterprise IT department or on public clouds, such as Amazon’s EC2.  They can move from one physical or geographical location to another using a variety of tools and technologies, such as Rightscale’s Cloud Management Platform or VMware’s VMotion.  Yet unfortunately, when a VM moves from one location to another, it becomes dependent on the networking infrastructure of the physical appliances attached to the new location.

For the past decade of networking, the basic infrastructure setup consisted of applications running on servers  that were then segmented by switches into virtual local area networks.  Those switches then connected to routers and a potential plethora of appliances, depending on the application needs — physical devices such as load balancers, firewalls, unified threat management devices, Secure Socket Layer accelerators, virtual private network (VPN) concentrators, intrusion detection systems (IDS), data loss prevention devices and so on.

To be sure, some networking devices and appliances are now available in virtual form.  Switches and routers have begun to move toward virtualization with VMware’s vSwitch, Cisco’s Nexus 1000v, the open source Open vSwitch and routers and firewalls running in various VMs from the company I helped found, Vyatta.  For load balancers, Citrix has released a version of its Netscaler VPX software that runs on top of its virtual machine, XenServer; and Zeus Systems has an application traffic controller that can be deployed as a virtual appliance on Amazon EC2, Joyent and other public clouds.

Yet the fundamental problem remains: Most networking appliances are still stuck in physical hardware — hardware that may or may not be deployed where the applications need them, which means those applications and their associated VMs can be left with major gaps in their infrastructure needs. Without a full-featured and stateful firewall to protect an application, it’s susceptible to various Internet attacks.  A missing load balancer that operates at layers three through seven leaves a gap in the need to distribute load between multiple application servers. Meanwhile, the lack of an SSL accelerator to offload processing may lead to performance issues and without an IDS device present, malicious activities may occur.  Without some (or all) of these networking appliances available in a virtual environment, a VM may find itself constrained, unable to take full advantage of the possible economic benefits.

Cisco, the networking giant, has articulated a multiphase plan toward virtual application deployment and network appliances in its Datacenter 3.0 architecture. The company does not, however, offer any specifics as to its time lines for full network virtualization, so it remains to be seen if the industry will wait for the market leader or move to realize the benefits of virtual appliances for networking all on its own.

Such timing is key, in my mind. The networking industry is clearly moving toward virtual appliances; the faster it gets there, the faster applications in the cloud, public or private, will be able to benefit from the same networking infrastructure they currently enjoy in the physical world. At which point networking architectures will change to a degree we’ve not seen in well over a decade.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• VMware’s Cloudy Ambitions: Can It Repeat Hypervisor Success?
• A 2011 Infrastructure Forecast
• Measuring IT Energy, from Virtual Environment to Application

A quick look at a five-year chart of VMware’s stock illustrates the competitive turmoil that the company has faced as virtualization platforms — ranging from open-source offerings such as Xen to Microsoft’s Hyper-V (bundled in Windows Server) — have proliferated and become freely available in most major operating systems:

Under relatively new CEO Paul Maritz, a longtime Microsoft executive, VMware has been making big acquisitions, first picking up SpringSource (GigaOM Pro, subscription required) to gain a foothold with application developers and the open source community, and more recently, buying Zimbra, which offers cloud-based mail and collaboration applications.  The acquisitions have been widely interpreted as attempts to move up the software stack from the virtualization layer, and into applications. However, in interviews I did yesterday with executives at VMware, they described how focused they remain on virtualization, and the following competitive advantages that they claim they can leverage:

One Of the Toughest Computer Science Problems. When I asked Bogomil Balkansky, VP of product marketing in VMware’s server business unit, about threats from free, bundled virtualization competitors, he stressed that VMware offers its own free hypervisor, and that the management, security and disaster recovery tools that it offers on a paid basis are key differentiators, especially for IT administrators focused on “control.”

“The idea that lots of eyeballs from the open source community produces a better product is not the case in our market,” he said, noting that VMware has more than 3,000 engineers working to make its virtualization platform more efficient. “Efficient virtualization is one of the toughest problems to solve in computer science,” he said. With regard to competition from Microsoft, he and other company executives claimed that Microsoft is years behind VMware in research on virtualization. “Also, it’s one thing to get a blue screen [of death] for a single operating system, and quite another thing to get 10 of them across multiple operating systems,” he said.

The Double Down: 16 Virtual Machines Per CPU. I also got a demo of some of the forward-looking moves VMware is making from Raj Mallem Pati, director of product marketing for VMware’s desktop business unit, and his team.  Clearly, VMware is very focused on greater efficiency in data centers that serve desktop users at enterprises. Specifically, the team noted that in current tests with Intel’s Nehalem processor, they are able to efficiently run 16 virtual machines per CPU in servers. That’s double the maximum amount found in many deployments, and could potentially help users save on space, power and physical servers in data centers. As it works toward this goal, the team is also focusing on reducing latency in many types of enterprise applications.

Virtualization As the On-ramp to Cloud Computing. In a talk with Steve Herrod, VMware’s CTO and SVP of R&D — and also one of the “graybeards” at the company — he characterized virtualization as “the on-ramp to cloud computing,” and, in many ways, a prerequisite for it. He said VMware has more than 1,000 partners focused on cloud computing solutions, ranging from carriers such as AT&T and Verizon to cloud hosting providers. When I asked whether he believes most businesses will want hybrid private/public clouds, he said very much so. With regard to local applications, he also noted that VMware itself uses many of them.

In response to questions about possible threats from operating systems bundling virtualization platforms, he noted that VMware remains operating system-agnostic, and works closely to tie its platform to popular operating systems efficiently. “Operating systems are rigid,” he noted, “and with efficient virtualization helping to manage hardware, the operating system doesn’t need to worry about as many things.” Herrod also anecdotally noted some of VMware’s more unusual field deployments, including installations at the F.B.I., and “in many nuclear submarines.”

Throughout my visit, there was no question that everyone at VMware is aware of increased competition on the virtualization front. (Oracle announced renewed focus on virtualization just today.) Time will tell whether the company’s operating system-agnostic, proprietary software strategy will pay off, but, flying in the face of free things, one thing’s for sure: VMware is going to have to offer more for the money.

Top image courtesy of Dearoot on Flickr.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• VMware’s Cloudy Ambitions: Can It Repeat Hypervisor Success?
• Measuring IT Energy, from Virtual Environment to Application

Throughout the recession, Red Hat delivered quarter after quarter of profit and revenue growth, including in the most recent three-month period; it has also built up $1 billion in cash and attracted large companies such as The Gap to standardize on its Linux-based enterprise platform. And the stock market has rewarded Red Hat steadily, as seen below:

So how has Red Hat consistently done so well during such punishing times? CEO Jim Whitehurst, the former Delta Airlines chief who joined the Raleigh, N.C.-based company in January of 2008, has kept it focused on a number of offbeat strategies, the most significant of which include:

Open Source Tackles the Cost Crunch. IT departments have had their budgets shaved to razor-thin levels, but Red Hat’s open-source enterprise Linux, middleware, virtualization and other solutions strip out many up-front costs from companies that want to transition to its platforms.

Red Hat Sells Support — Well. Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year. All 25 of the company’s largest support subscribers renewed subscriptions, even despite a higher price tag.

In the meantime, several startups have been following Red Hat’s lead (GigaOM Pro, subscription required), among them:

• Cloudera, which sells subscription support for the open-source Hadoop platform, for querying large data sets.
• Acquia, which sells subscription support for the increasingly popular open-source Drupal content management system (CMS). (Many newspapers and publishers are deploying Drupal for online publishing.)
• Eucalyptus Systems, which provides support, training and services for the open-source Eucalyptus cloud computing platform. Eucalyptus is aiming to serve companies that want to customize private and public cloud offerings.

Other Income. IBMer and open-source software pundit Savio Rodrigues published a highly interesting report last year on Red Hat, titled “Is Red Hat a Software Firm or Financial Institution?“  In it, he noted that for two years running, nearly 50 percent of Red Hat’s income before taxes was classified in financial reports as “Other Income.” In other words, a substantial portion of Red Hat’s earnings comes from outside its core software-and-support business.

Upon closer inspection, Rodrigues determined that Red Hat generates the lion’s share of the “Other Income” from conservative fixed-income investments and some equity investments. He also provided a data set showing how Red Hat’s “Other Income” compares to that of other large U.S. software companies, a portion of which is shown below. Oddly, the fact that steady profits on fixed-income investments have kept Red Hat’s overall results consistent throughout the recession is rarely cited in analysis of its quarterly reports:

Linux On the Desktop? Fuggeddaboudit. Linux, which is at the core of Red Hat’s software strategy, has never been a huge success on the desktop, and especially not on the business desktop. Red Hat officials have shrewdly maintained that desktop Linux is not a core focus for the company, but that virtualization and the facilitation of desktop and cloud operating systems applications are.

While Red Hat has remained remarkably consistent and profitable, a rosy future isn’t guaranteed. It is frequently cited as an acquisition target, with VMware and Oracle noted as possible buyers, but its stock market success has caused it to trade at a very high multiple. As noted above, it also depends heavily on successful investments, returns for which may or may not stay consistent. And there are those who question whether heavy enterprise dependency on Linux makes long-term sense.

Yet so far the company’s unusual business approaches have made it a success. So while many in the open source community have noted that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which was approved by European regulators yesterday, will leave Novell and Red Hat as the only independent, public U.S. software companies focused primarily on open source left standing, Red Hat has proven that open source doesn’t mean closed business opportunities.

Top image courtesy of Red Hat Press.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• VMware’s Cloudy Ambitions: Can It Repeat Hypervisor Success?
• A Tale of Two Vendors: Will Oracle, Red Hat Earnings Converge?
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

Zimbra’s open-source collaboration tools are increasingly popular, and the company claims to serve more than 55 million mailboxes.  (Yahoo acquired the company for $350 million in 2007, but terms of VMware’s acquisition were not disclosed.) Meanwhile, VMware has been struggling to contend with free and open-source competitors to its virtualization offerings, including free options bundled in many operating systems. It has become essential for the company to diversify its software products away from just costly proprietary virtualization offerings. Relatively new CEO Paul Maritz, a long-time Microsoft executive, has been pursuing acquisitions in order to achieve that goal, especially focusing on the cloud. Brian Byun, VP and GM of cloud services at VMware, said in a statement that:

“Over the coming years, we expect more organizations, especially small and medium size businesses, to increasingly buy core IT solutions that deliver cloud-like simplicity in end-user and operational experience. Zimbra is a great example of the type of scalable ‘cloud era’ solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud. It will be a building block in an expanding portfolio of solutions that can be offered as a virtual appliance or by a cloud service provider. “

Meanwhile, in an advisory, SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin said, “VMWare is clearly moving aggressively up the stack and is not content to be limited to virtualization or even infrastructure (SpringSource).  With the Zimbra acquisition VMWare is squarely positioning itself in the applications and collaboration space.”

To take that analysis further, cloud-based and service-oriented platforms are, in the end, only as good as the applications that companies can offer on them. Many companies and users will not subscribe to cloud-based services, or favor virtualized platforms that don’t present them with a healthy amount of usable software.

The same story has already been played out in the arena of operating systems and applications, many times over. Operating systems that win are ones that have many applications available for them. Maritz would be acutely aware of the parallels between standard operating systems, virtualization platforms and applications, given the many years he spent at Microsoft.

With its SpringSource acquisition VMware gained clout with developers, and the Zimbra acquisition looks to be a very direct move into cloud-based applications and collaboration options. Judging from these acquisitions, Paul Maritz has in mind a very different company from the virtualization-focused one that VMware has been in the past

Related GigaOM Pro Research:

What VMware’s SpringSource Acquisition Means for Microsoft

Social Media in the Enterprise

Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated