VMworld has continued to grow every year in terms of both user population and topic areas.  A few years ago, much of the VMworld content was focused on convincing data center managers that virtualization technology was here to stay and could be used for even mission critical applications.  Those are days long gone though and the show is now focused on how virtualization can migrate IT resources to the cloud but there’s also a heavy emphasis on the tools needed to get virtualization to scale and be manageable.

One of the more interesting companies at VMworld this year is a small start up called Xsigo.  In my role as an analyst, I see loads of start ups and there are very few that have technology that is differentiated enough for me to consider them “game changing.”  Riverbed was one, Xangati another and most recently SeaMicro are a few and Xsigo is another.

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Last month I wrote a the post “Can Anything Derail F5?” where I explored F5’s business as well as the drivers of the application delivery controller (ADC) market.  One of the companies I mentioned in there was a small, niche vendor called A10 Networks.  A10 Networks has received many accolades since its launch in 2004 and has raised $39 million in funding through three rounds.

A10’s claim to fame has been that it can offer the performance of the market leaders such as F5 and Brocade but at a lower price making many wonder how they were able to get as price aggressive as they have been and still maintain traditional industry margins.  It appears now though that A10 may have taken some short cuts in product development.

Although I’m not an equity analyst I do spend a fair amount of my time following the Street and the relative performance of the companies I cover.  These are companies like Cisco, Juniper, Riverbed, BlueCoat, Brocade and F5.  I’ve had many people ask me over the past six months or so what my favorite name in the space is today and it has been, and remains, F5.

On Wednesday July 21st, the company announced its June quarter earnings and absolutely crushed it; and raised guidance for the 5th quarter in a row.  The company posted revenue of $230.5 million, well ahead of Street expectations.  According to Yahoo, Street consensus was $218 million but I had heard that the whisper number from the Street was $223 to $225 and F5 beat that number as well and then gave guidance of 5-7% sequential growth.  Not bad for a company that everyone thought Cisco would run over a couple of years ago.

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Oracle’s recent x86 server announcement included new 10GbE networking products. It’s interesting to see that Oracle remains committed to x86 servers even as they promote their new “Software. Hardware. Complete.” tagline. Recall that Larry Ellison rationalized his purchase of Sun by claiming Oracle is the only vendor that can deliver a complete solution including servers, storage, OS, management, applications and networking. But do the new networking products fit the billing?

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On Tuesday the 29^th at this years “Cisco Live,” Cisco unveiled its latest collaboration tool–an Android based tablet called “Cius” (which coincidentally rhymes with Zeus!).  I’ve seen many people tweet and blog about how Cisco is trying to take on Apple’s iPad but based on my conversations with Cisco people here at Cisco Live, I can say that’s definitely not the case.

The Cius is a tablet computer, there’s no doubt about that, but that’s probably the only commonality with the iPad.  The Cius is meant to dock into the base of a phone and makes a video phone.  The device can then be undocked and carried around as tablet.

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On Tuesday, June 8, a young rookie pitcher named Stephen Strasburg made his major league debut in for the Washington Nationals. The debut was surrounded by more hype than any MLB debut since the arrival of Ken Griffey Jr. in Seattle decades ago and the young phenom didn’t disappoint. He struck out 14, including the last 7 batters he faced and left everyone wanting more.

The following day, Brocade Communications held its annual technology day amid similar hype (at least in the tech world) where many people (myself included) thought the actual content would fall well below the expectations of hype. Tech day and the related announcements was a breath of fresh air for the beleaguered Brocade as the company has been under fire from Wall Street and the media for the erratic performance of the SAN and networking divisions over the past couple of quarters.

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Cloud computing is being touted as the next great computing revolution but actual, live deployments are limited.  One of the biggest barriers holding cloud computing back is security.  Yankee Group’s 2009 Transforming Infrastructure and Transforming Application survey revealed that the #1 barrier to cloud computing was security.  Despite this fact, there really hasn’t been any vendor addressing the unique security needs of cloud computing.  At Interop last month, Application Delivery Networking market leader F5 announced enhancements to its BIG-IP products to secure applications that are deployed in the cloud.
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The use of virtualization technology has grown exponentially over the past decade.  However, its primary use has been to consolidate the number of servers in corporate data centers.  Recently though, advancements in virtualization technology has given rise to the next wave of usage for this technology.  That is using virtualization (and cloud computing) to separate all of the components of computing (not just servers) to simplify and make computing more efficient.  This will work by creating various pools of compute resources that are mobilized and move around the network as business policy dictates.

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This has been a busy year for the wireless LAN (WLAN) market with several vendors making major moves to jockey for leadership in an increasingly crowded market.  The year started off with the IPO of Meru Networks.  This gives some much needed credibility and capital to a company that has been struggling over the past few years.  Time will tell whether Meru can maintain the momentum from the IPO but it has a punchers chance now.

Interop rolled around in May and saw Cisco release its “Clean Air” wireless portfolio.  Clean air allows the Cisco wireless solution to continually scan the “air quality” by looking for things (microwave, camera interference, etc) that can interfere with the WLAN operations.  The solution then automatically adjusts the configuration to ensure optimum performance.  Clean air is a significant release for Cisco as this is the best competitive feature Cisco has had outside of its integration with the wired network.

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My last blog post on the CRS-3 highlights an example where an industry titan like Cisco continues to pull off significant innovations even though routing serves the role as the company’s cash cow.  Making the innovation more impressive is the fact that developments of this magnitude are and can only be achieved through internal development.  In contrast, I continue to wonder about other parts of the tech sector where those milking their cash cows are rapidly becoming obsolete.  A glaring example of this is the IT management software market, where the “big 4” framework vendors about to find out how far behind the times their products are.  Sure we all read about the piecemeal acquisitions that HP, IBM, CA and BMC make (see CA’s latest Nimsoft), but in effect they are stagnating while VMware is re-defining the landscape.

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