About a year ago, I posted a blog entry on my predictions for 2008.

As it turned out, they were more or less spot on: server virtualization did indeed gain some serious momentum over the last 12 months, and we saw a flurry of end-user organizations migrating their DNS, DHCP and IPAM servers to virtual computing environments. And so, although the news headlines have been all about doom and gloom over the last few months, the market for Nixu Software’s virtualization-ready DNS, DHCP and IPAM software appliances has remained as strong as ever. In fact, we’re now projecting solid three-figure growth (as in hundreds of percent) for H1 2009 vs. H1 2008, regardless of the economic turmoil that surrounds us.

Now, if you are even close to being as critical as I am, and have been reading money.cnn.com as of late,  you might be wondering if yours truly is a) delusional, b) full of it xxit, c) something of a simpleton, or d) all of the above. Rest assured, I am none. Rather, I think our recent success is explained by two factors: server virtualization and Mordacs. Please check out the link and allow me to explain.

This comic strip on Mordac depicts a classic example of what happens when organizations end up running plain BIND and DHCPD servers in their network. Mordac compiles the source code on the OS of his choice… Then he does a bit of fine-tuning… A few little configs here and there… And a few short weeks later, voilá – you now have at least somewhat operational DNS and DHCP services in your network.

Now that Mordac has taken care of his job, he goes on holiday. He has deserved it, mind you, because of all the hard work he put into building you a network. And although Mordac already had used up all his annual leave, his boss has no other choice but to allow him to venture off to Russia, because Mordac happens to be holding the entire organization a hostage. If Mordac left, his boss would have to write off the entire business infrastructure as no one else really knows how all that stuff works. Mordac has put it all together, you see. And while this of course is all good news for Mordac’s perceived job security, it’s not so good news for his employer, being at the other end of the stick and all.

And so, while Mordac is still submarining away somewhere off the Siberian coastline, his boss starts asking the difficult questions. He knows they’ll have to cut down the overheads in the near term, so he has started thinking about consolidating their network services and applications to a virtual computing environment. This would reduce the server management overheads, as well as create savings on the utilities and data centre costs. He has also been thinking about finding a supported, commercial DNS and IPAM solution that would allow his team to simplify network management, to streamline operations. This would allow him to transfer Mordac into more productive development projects where he got some real work done, rather than hiding away in the broom closet with the DNS servers, as he usually does. After all, Mordac’s boss is currently paying a consultant $200 per hour to do this work, so assigning Mordac to these tasks would save the organization almost $30,000 per month.

Surfing the Internet, Mordac’s boss lands at Nixu Software’s homepage. These guys are selling software appliances for DNS, DHCP and IPAM that even the boss himself can install in 10 minutes. Better yet, these Nixu Products are available as software appliances that can be run as VMs on his Citrix and VMware platforms at only $495 per server per year, without the cost of hardware and hw maintenance associated with hardware appliances. And this $495 per server per year, by the way, is almost exactly the same amount that Mordac costs his company each day…

My prediction for 2009? More of the same.

To learn more about Nixu Products, please visit www.nixusoftware.com.