VMware has obviously staked out the clear dominant position in the virtual machine market. However, owning the hypervisor alone may not be enough. VMware announced the acquisition of B-hive Networks, a California and Israeli based company that developed application performance management for virtual applications. According to this article in ComputerWorld, the news is comes as bad news for several start ups that were were trying to establish themselves. With VMware themselves including virtual application performance management, a 3rd party competitor is going to be at an extreme disadvantage to the built in VMware solution. It clearly signals a move by VMware that they want not only to provide the environment for virtual machines, but many of the

This is in contrast to VMware's VMsafe program where they have made available APIs to allow security companies have access to secure the virtual environments. That would seem to indicate that VMware is willing and looking for 3rd party security companies to secure the virtual environment. Is this only a temporary condition and will VMware eventually seek to security the virtual environment themselves? Clearly it appears that Citrix will look to 3rd parties to secure their virtual environments.

At the end of the day does VMware take a page out of the Microsoft playbook and use their dominance in the virtual environment space to eventually also control and monetize the entire virtual environment? If so does that present opportunity to Citrix and Microsoft to form a consortium to take VMware on? I guess we will have to wait and see how this shakes out.