Interesting Moves in the Tech Space

I know I said I wouldn't blog about infrastructure stuff anymore, but what I should have said was that I'm not going to delve into the minutae or technical details.  I prefer to pontificate about the rigours of the daily tech news which weave around virtualization, software infrastructure management and software stuff which lives in the more-or-less world of Windows.   Nothing wrong with other operating system products, but I just don't care about them anymore.

So Riverbed announced that they're going to release an optimization feature for stream delivery of App-V application packages through their Steelhead appliances.  That's really cool, and if you're at all aware of the general concept of network compression and stream optimization it's pretty exciting news for anyone looking to deploy "fat" applications like Office, PhotoShop or Autodesk Inventor, to thousands of users on a large WAN.

Now I'm expecting that the increased interest in VMware by Cisco to produce some sort of announcement as well.  Cisco has been dropping hints at some sort of major announcements, so who knows.  They're lining up against Microsoft it seems, along with EMC, Oracle, and Symantec, even though (as we all know too well) they stab each other in the back when the lights are out, but in the morning they're kissing and pouring coffee at the breakfast table.  Business is really weird.  Unless VMware diversifies much more, they're not going to stave off bankruptcy in the face of Microsoft's ramped up marketing efforts.  Hyper-V is not going away.  SCVMM is not going away.  VMware needs to merge with someone like Cisco or IBM if they're thinking long-term.  The writing is on the wall.

Another interesting announcement was that Acresso (formerly Macrovision) is going to release a packaging product that will import and convert MSI packages to App-V packages.  Very f-ing cool indeed... IF it works as promised.  That would be huge.

On a more personal note, I'm scheduled for an upcoming MCTS exam on November 15.  So I'm going to be studying hard beginning this weekend.  I'm heading out on travel tonight for the weekend.  For my daughter's high school cheerleading state championship.  Go PAHS!