XenSource : Cassatt :: Virtualization : Automation

Here's an update on what could be an interesting partnership: XenSource (the commercial end of Xen, the opensource hypervisor) is teaming-up with Cassatt for a webcast on June 6th. (which, by-the-way, is yours-truly's birthday... a distinction which I share with Tim O'Reilly and an old buddy from Sun, Simon Phipps).

XenSource, you will recall, is the current underdog VM provider in the market - a pure-play high-performance approach to application virtualization. Part of their competitive strategy is (a) how they price (zero if you choose the open-source version, but way lower than the competition if you buy from XenSource), and (b) how they distribute (bundled in with the major Linux distros, not to mention Solaris)

The webcast has two heavy-hitters: Simon Crosby (who's XenSource's CTO), and Rob Gingell (who was a past Sun Fellow and VP -- now Cassatt's CTO). It should be interesting to hear their take on automating virtualization, given the market noise around XenSource - but also given the fact that they themselves don't offer a sophisticated VM management/automation solution... but Cassatt does.

Given I have an 'inside track' on this, I suspect that the conversation will also turn to "what comes next" after virtualization - probably a pretty valuable conversation if you care about your IT career a year from now.