Enterprise computing enters the 2nd phase of atom composition

It seems that everyone talks about being liquid, fluid as an entering ticket for virtualization market.

Red Hat has massive Linux fluidity moment | The Register

It is natural for Linux vendor to stand by virtualization. Although classical Redhat talk about the subject is always related to Xen, I think Redhat has finally done something beyond hype this time. To be fair, though, I must say that this is more a victory of Amazon instead of Redhat. After all, Amazon EC2 has been running close relative of Redhat Enterprise all the time, the partnership from Redhat has only endorsement value.

This media coverage, however, has given me a thought about virtualization selling model. As I have commented here, using software license model to sell virtualization products can pose a serious challenge for vendor like VMWare. Selling virtualization as on-demand service is, however, a completely different story.

Usually, small to medium enterprise are not typical target customer of IT consulting company, but those enterprise can benefit from virtualization nevertheless. While Fortune 500 companies are still not likely to adopt Amazon EC2 services, small to medium enterprise have less resistance on this front and are more likely to deploy their application on EC2. In this way, Amazon has opened new business opportunity without facing the political challenges of traditional IT warlords. How clever.

It would also be very interesting to see BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition run on EC2. For those of you who don't know about this BEA product, it is a special WebLogic Server edition that lets JRockit VM to act directly as underling guest OS in VMWare, saving computing overhead of OS level facilities. Currently this product is only certified against VMWare, but technically it shouldn't be too difficult to port it to run under EC2 architecture. What's more difficult is for BEA to decide whether it needs to tap into this changing market and change its license model from per CPU to per usage to appropriately map with this virtualization trend.

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