Virtualization survivor

Vizioncore Inc. is one of the more successful players in the VMware ecosystem. Like many other virtualization tool vendors, it has placed all bets on the VMware platform, although it may support Windows Server 2008's Hyper-V in the future. Vizioncore is also jockeying to position products around not just VMware but offerings from large enterprise management software vendors such as IBM, CA and HP. That requires a bit of a dance.

And it makes one wonder: If I buy a Vizioncore product today, what will happen once the market finally consolidates down to a few large players?

Vizioncore doesn't disclose its financials, but Hoovers lists Vizioncore's 2007 sales at $2 million and total number of employees at 45. In our meeting yesterday, president and COO Chris Akerberg stated that the company has more than 9,000 customers and sales volumes in the "mid-eight figures."

Vizioncore is best known for vRangerPro, an agentless point-in-time virtual machine backup tool, and its vReplicator image replication software. More recently it has added the virtual machine monitoring and coversion programs labeled vCharterPro and vConverter, respectively. Each product has its own "value proposition." For example, Akerberg claims that its PtoV (physical-to-virtual machine) tool offers more scalability than does VMware's utility. It lacks the extra "bells and whistles" of Platespin's offering but he says costs much less.

As Vizioncore's products evolve, they may increasingly overlap with larger, more integrated management system offerings. For example, Akerberg says that a future version of vCharterPro will monitor physical as well as virtual machines. That's all fine and good for some small and mid-size organizations, but if I'm a large business I'm probably already using an enterprise management framework such as Tivoli or OpenView to manage thousands of physical machines. I don't need another tool to manage physical machines. What I need is a version of vCharterPro that rolls up neatly into that framework.

This is where Vizioncore's product strategy appears to bifurcate. "We understand that the investment has been made in large environments, so we'll focus on going deeper in the virtual environment, rather than the physical," Akerberg says. While Vizioncore only offers connectivity to enterprise management tools via SNMP hooks today, he says the company continues to pursue discussions with the larger players, and hopes to offer tighter integration with those products -- eventually. Nothing has come of that yet.

So will Vizioncore, like other small management tool vendors in the VMware ecosystem, get pulled into the orbits of the giants? Or will it find itself locked out as those vendors bring their own overlapping offerings into the enterprise system management fold? Akerberg, of course, is optimistic about Vizioncore's prospects. "Many [larger vendors] want to partner and buy versus building their own capabilities," he says. Akerberg sees Vizioncore as a partner, rather than a buyout target, and notes that as an independent business unit of Quest Software Inc. ($631 million in sales; 3346 employees), the company has financial backing.

In fact, part of Vizioncore's strategy going forward is to grow by scooping up some of the smaller players in this market. The company is pursing two areas, Akerberg says: "Automation and expanding scope by acquisition."