As XenServer’s market share grows, it becomes easier for ISV and reseller partners to justify investing time and attention to building XenServer expertise and understanding how to sell and position against VMWare.  This trend will become more pronounced as the new XenServer Advanced edition begins to take hold in the market.
For over a year we have had a free enterprise class virtualization product.  This has helped us gain market share and we have grown from 3% to 11%.   Now, as those customer s who have been using free XenServer increase their virtualization footprint to take advantage of virtualization’s vast benefits, they will likely upgrade to Advanced – which is only $1000 per server – giving them enterprise class HA capability at a very affordable price.  The virtuous cycle repeats itself.  I recently spoke to a Citrix Platinum Partner who expressed his enthusiasm in the Advanced Edition.  His opinion is that Advanced Edition would open up new market segments to XenServer.  Even loyal VMWare customers are now considering XenServer for incremental virtualization projects. Why?  The XenServer value proposition is impossible to ignore.  And as multi hypervisor environments take hold in the enterprise as well as SMB markets, XenServer’s partner ecosystem will expand further.