Click here to RSVP to WHIR Events:
New York City - March 25, 2010
Chicago - April 22, 2010
Toronto - May 20, 2010

Recent posts by Liam:

Parallels Summit 2010 - Day 1 Session: Clouds with 100% Chance of Profit

Follow the WHIR at Parallels Summit 2010 This Week

New WHIR tv Clip With Shawn Colo - a Preview of Parallels Keynote

Sign up for Next Week’s Houston WHIR Event

WHIR Webinars Old and New - Next Week, PCI/DSS

Virtualization software company VMware held its VMworld event this week in San Francisco, marking what would seem to be an important milestone in the development of virtualization – particularly in terms of the popular understanding of the concept.

  Outside the especially-privy industries – software, hosting, etc. – virtualization has yet to foster any widespread understanding. Up until very recently, that is. The fairly well known story involves VMware, the virtualization innovator filing its IPO approximately a month ago and raising approximately $1.1 billion, the largest tech company IPO since Google’s.

  And VMware’s stock has been rising since the IPO, reaching $82.75 at one point on Tuesday (it closed lower). According to an Associated Press article, VMware’s market value is close to $30 billion, putting it behind Microsoft, Oracle and SAP as publicly traded software companies go.

  Those kinds of numbers, needless to say, get the investment folks interested. Even those without a vested interest in virtualization. All of a sudden, there is big increase in interest in VMware, and subsequently a lot of interest in virtualization.

  And now VMworld, the company’s annual conference. Last year’s attendance: 6,700. This year’s: about 11,000. More than 200 booths. A tremendous amount of media coverage – there are hundreds of news articles about “VMworld” from this week in Google’s news search.

  That attention isn’t reserved exclusively for VMware. No doubt, the company is the concept’s de facto standard bearer. But VMworld, this year, is showcasing virtualization to the world of curious investors – and that includes the other virtualization vendors, large and small, in attendance.

  One of those is Web hosting’s own virtualization stalwart, SWsoft, which said this week it would be bringing the beta of version 4.0 of its Virtuozzo software to the event to demonstrate some of its new capabilities.