Red Hat, IBM, HP And Others Form Open Virtualization Alliance To Combat VMware

Several leading computing companies have joined hands to  form the Open Virtualization Alliance to fuel development and adoption of open source virtualisation technology.

The Open Virtualization Alliance has been formed by Hewlett Packard, Red Hat and IBM, and also includes Eucalyptus Software, BMC and Novell.

The alliance will focus on encouraging businesses and developers to adopt open source virtualisation systems based on kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor.

The companies said that the alliance will provide education to businesses and developers and coach them on best practices. Technical advice will also be given to businesses to help them figure out which virtualisation option best suites their mode of operations.

But the alliance's main objective will be to siphon users away from VMware’s proprietary products. The alliance likened VMware to Microsoft, a company which likes to create a huge ecosystem and put small time vendors out of business. The alliance will offer open source alternatives to VMware’s solutions.

“VMware is following a strategy that Microsoft did, of create a big ecosystem, take over what's hot, and put the smaller vendor out of business. What we are offering is an open environment and a level playing field... and it's an emerging market where you are not going to have a company that wants to own everything,” Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager for Red Hat's cloud computing business unit, The Register reports.