Collaborations abound at VMworld 2011

If there was one thing I saw and heard about at VMworld, was the number of third party collaborations that were taking place. While not explicitly stated by VMware at VMworld, the show floor had many different collaborations that were taking place. This level of collaboration shows a level of maturity within the virtualization and cloud vendor ecosystems. A maturity, that shows that the vendors understand the benefits of leveraging other companies to lower their overall costs while producing better and more attractive products. Some of the collaborations I saw where purely the resale of products, while others were integrations between products. Here are some that stuck in my mind:

• Acronis and VMturbo teamed up to produce Acronis vmProtect 6 which uses VMTurbo to monitor and add additional DR/DA/BC remediation concepts into the Acronis suite.
• Catbird is not only reselling vShield App but has integrated its APIs into their own product.
• HyTrust has worked deals with Trend Micro and CA to resell their product
• NexantaStor Software showed up not only in the VMworld Hands on Labs, but within quite a few other storage appliances.
• Teradici has teamed up with Wyse and Imprivata to provide thin and zero clients
• Veeam has teamed up with Exagrid to produce a disk-based backup appliance
• Veeam has teamed up with Astute Networks to improve performance with backups as well as monitoring.
• VMware is leading a collaboration between Blue Lock, Colt, SingTel, and Softbank Telecom called Global Connect
• VMware is collaborating with Samsung for the Horizon Mobile (formerly Mobile Virtualization Platform)
• VMware, Arista Networks, Cisco and others collaborating on VXLAN standard.

There are many other such collaborations but these are the one’s that stick out to me, what collaborations did you see at VMworld?
In either case, this is a big win for the virtualization ecosystem, as now we should see a growing number of combined products which will benefit everyone. Becoming good at one thing is far easier than trying to be the one tool for everyone.