#13 Newsmaker of 2009: Grant Aitken of VMware

Last year’s top newsmaker didn’t have the whirlwind type of year that landed him on the cover of a national magazine, but Grant Aitken’s company certainly made headlines throughout 2009.

As the virtualization pioneer moved more into cloud computing, enterprise Java and other strategic areas, it firmly planted its foot with channel partners. Throughout its VMworld event the company told anyone who would listen that it has no plans to move further into direct sales. VMware unveiled its next-generation partner network program. The new plan will provide channel partners with more financial incentives to create virtualization practices based on VMware technology.

But’s that’s not all VMware did in 2009. It entred into a bold three-way coalition with Cisco and EMC to develop the VBlock infrastructure packages.

The company’s biggest product release was vSphere 4 featuring VM clustering and agentless VM backup. It sealed an OEM agreement with Intel that would bring its virtualization technology to the mostly forgotten system builder community.

VMware completed its acquisition of enterprise Java vendor SpringSource, a US$362 million deal designed to help customers build, run and manage applications to be run on cloud-based platforms.

It also bought a five per cent stake in Terremark, a close partner that provides collocation and managed infrastructure services using VMware’s virtualization software.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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