System Center Guide

I firmly believe that this year will host more acquisitions in the virtualisation market than all the other IT markets combined! To start us off, VMWare, the current market leader, has just announced its plans to acquire Thinstall, Inc. and Foedus.

Here’s what the company had to say about the acquisitions:

Today VMware announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Thinstall, a privately-held application virtualization software company headquartered in San Francisco. VMware is acquiring Thinstall to expand its desktop virtualization capabilities which help customers better provision, deploy and update desktop environments. The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed in the current fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed.

VMware also disclosed its acquisition of services-related assets from Foedus, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based provider of virtualization technologies and services and a former North America Premier Partner. The goal of this acquisition is to accelerate the services intellectual property

(IP) development release to our VIP and VAC partner community.

With the acquisition of Foedus, we intend to work with our VMware partners to further expand their virtualization services expertise to help them expand their own virtualization services businesses by equipping them with best practices and IP. VMware will develop services and sales IP to directly benefit our partner community in new solution areas around VDI, Compliance, and ROBO (Remote Office Branch Office). In 2008, VMware is committed to increasing the mix of services revenue that is delivered by our partners. We are evolving our go-to-market customer coverage model to drive more services through our partner community.

The five principals of Foedus have joined VMware and Mike Reilly, the former CEO, has joined the Americas Partner Management Team and will be focused on Partner Services Enablement and Development.

Both of these acquisitions further expand the desktop virtualization opportunity for the VMware channel. Please read the press release for the full story on these acquisitions. We will post materials to Partner Central as more information becomes available.