Can a platform vendor be an effective management vendor?

Today we announced a preview of MokaFive’s new VirtualBox client for desktop management. With the addition of an open-source hypervisor, we are fulfilling our vision to be truly both OS-agnostic, as well as hypervisor-agnostic, giving our customers freedom of choice. This is only our first step, and we will continue to add support for more hypervisors, including broadening our current Linux-based baremetal to address Type-1.

This made me wonder: Can an OS or hypervisor platform vendor also be an effective management vendor? In other words, is it in the customer’s best interest to buy a management solution from the same company that supplies its operating system or its hypervisor? It seems to me that it’s impossible to meet your customers’ management needs when your company is tied to one platform. If you’re Microsoft, you’re going to sell a management solution that supports Windows. But what if, down the road, the customer wants to deploy a few Macs on the network? The customer will be out of luck because they are locked in to the Microsoft ecosystem.

As enterprises undergo transformation with more remote, mobile and contract workers, different platforms will have to be deployed or managed based on specific situations. IT needs to have a management solution that is not tied to one platform and is truly future proof. We’re already helping our customers to expand choice in operating systems and in hardware. Today we’re expanding choice in hypervisors. We’ve added our first free hypervisor for Macs—the open-source VirtualBox client—in addition to the VMware Fusion we have long used.

Choice has always been an important factor for our customers, who need the freedom to purchase the IT solutions best tailored for their business, regardless of which solutions they already have in place. It all needs to work together seamlessly. Increasingly, Macs are being used in the enterprise and, with the right tools, they can be managed easily alongside PCs. I believe this is where end-user computing is going, and as such, what IT needs to factor in for their decision-making.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products