“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Mahatma Gandhi

Our team at Nixu Software has been working hard over the last 10 months. So hard, in fact, that I haven’t found the time to post blogs. While this sort of behaviour can often be attributed to inertia, we have had our hands so full with assignments from organizations virtualizing their DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management systems that time for public relations has been scarce at best. Yet given that our work has translated into great traction both in terms of sales growth and sustained profitability, I’m pretty sure this prioritization was spot on, as it has allowed us to recruite more people freeing up my time for blogging!

Talking about inertia, there seems to be some whenever paradigms shifts occur. Today, I had a discussion with Gartner analyst regarding the DDI market (DDI = DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management) because I honestly thought we should have been included in their most recent DDI market analysis. After all, although Gartner’s DDI study states that any vendor worth mentioning in it should have annual sales of at least USD 5M, Nixu turned over roughly USD 12M in 2009, yet we still didn’t make it to the study. And better yet, there were a few competitors listed whose annual revenues are less than USD 5M.

Go and figure.

Anyhow, as it turned out, the analyst I spoke with said he had not seen any traction from enterprises as far as virtualizing their DDI services was concerned. From my perspective that sounded a bit odd, because we have seen a large number of rather notable governmental agencies, enterprises and service providers all over the world looking to virtualize these core network services among others. I’m talking about DDI deployments consisting of anywhere from 50 to 350+ DDI servers with centralized management systems, so one would assume they don’t go undetected. Yet on the analyst radar, server virtualization was for labs. Hardware-based appliances were the real deal and quite possibly the pinnacle of networking:

- On the 6th day, IT manager found the hardware appliance. On the 7th day he rested.

- Lucky for us, IT manager had to return to office on Monday.

Here’s a little quizz for those of you who think that DDI virtualization is for labs. Are enterprises experimenting with virtualization because:

a) It’s a fun diversion from the harsh realities of our world?

b) Opposite sex thinks tweaking virtual servers is cool?

c) Their managers think that one of these days their company will save a bundle by making the test environment a reality and consolidating most of their dedicated servers to virtualized computing environment?

Of course everything is relative and sometimes answers a) and b) might be correct. But for the most part, we have found that our enterprise customers think option c) is the winner.

Lastly, to really understand what virtualization is all about, please click the picture below. You’ll find dollars and numbers in motion. If you would like these virtual dollars to float your way, you’d better contact our sales now.

In my next blog entry, I’ll be talking about two other emerging technologies suffering from inertia, IPv6 and DNSSEC. Stay tuned for more.