Among others, Red Hat and Microsoft have recently inked virtualisation interoperability deal, a watershed truce between the two sides of OS field, after the Novell pact.

There are also a spate of OEM deals doing the rounds. Virtual Iron has found another top OEM in form of Dell, which will resell Virtual Iron's server and storage software alongside the OEM's virtualization-friendly hardware. Virtual Iron inked similar pacts with IBM and HP before this.

Ask Andi Mann, the sharp analyst from EMA as to how impactful can be these recent acquisitions would be and he answers that he really sees Red Hat as lagging in this race, and facing a very difficult battle against VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix.

“The big differentiator for them all will continue to be virtual systems management (VSM), and the acquisitions you mention, and many others, all point to this. All of the vendors are continuing to build out and/or acquire management technologies, and I expect this to continue to be the hottest battle – around configuration control, process automation, provisioning and migration, etc. “ he says.

So, the confusion and debate around “clouds” will linger for the foreseeable future, as Vmware's Nagarajan puts it adding confidently that, “As cloud computing continues to define the terms and benefits it will deliver, VMware is working closely with technology leaders in many categories to set the stage for the open cloud.”

And he is not alone, because there are others like Nivio, a company that claims to be the online desktop pioneer, that are planning the roadmap well from a move to desktop to Computing as a Service. Though it is not looking at acquisitions now, CEO Sachin Duggal is upbeat that Nivio would stand out with its intelligent load balancing algorithm and redefine the many-to-one virtualisation and desktop distribution paradigm, both on complexity and costs, and, much better unlike traditional players, as he claims.

There is also expected a new launch in August this year that will whip up virtualisation flavor on the traditional application space of desktops too. “We are ahead of the curve. We are not looking at acquisitions now but there could be companies we would be interested in as we move on.”

And that's one thought, that connects almost every cloud guy right now. Virtually!

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