Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Fed-Up VMware Launches Marketing Counteroffensive Against Microsoft

VMware has, for the most part, turned the other cheek to Microsoft's many marketing campaigns over the years that sought to create the impression that its virtualization software was cheaper than VMware's. But VMware is apparently growing tired of this, as evidenced by its launch of a "Get The Facts" Web site that aims to rebut many of Microsoft's oft-voiced arguments.

In addition to touting its vMotion live migration feature as five times faster than Microsoft's, VMware kicks sand at the software giant's latest server virtualization update. "Hyper-V R3 will still fall short of vSphere 5 in critical areas like virtual security, storage management and business continuity," VMware said on the website.

Fed-Up Microsoft Gets Into Vertically Integrated Tablet Hardware

Microsoft this week decided that the only chance it has to challenge Apple's iPad is to make its own vertically integrated tablet, called Surface. For the first time, Microsoft will be making its own PC hardware, and while Surface could irk its OEM partners, it is a sign that the software giant isn't going to cede the tablet market without a fight.

Microsoft is clearly going to have to break a few eggs to make this omelet, and Surface is already one of the most adventurous things it has ever done.

Mitel CEO Says Company Making Progress In Cutting Channel Conflict

Mitel CEO Richard McBee told CRN last June that his company needed to get closer to the channel. This week, he gave us an update on the progress the unified communications vendor has made in clearing up channel conflict during the 18 months since he joined the company.

"The biggest, most challenging thing on the plate was the channel conversion we needed to make," McBee told CRN this week. "We moved a large percentage of our business to channels, and the team never skipped a beat, and our channel partners, I think, are recognizing the value of our portfolio."

Security Startup Bromium Uses Virtualization To Protect Mobile Users

Bromium, a startup led by the co-founders of the Xen open-source project, ventured out of stealth mode this week by offering a bit more information about how its technology helps protect PCs in the big, bad world outside the corporate firewall.

Bromium's technology uses Intel hardware-assisted virtualization to isolate OS tasks before they're executed, then hands them over to a piece of software called a "microvisor," which examines requests to ensure they're not malicious.

"It works automatically, on the fly, whenever the user does anything risky or vulnerable," Bromium co-founder and former Citrix CTO Simon Crosby told CRN. "With this, we can deliver a desktop that runs at native performance but is resilient to any attacks."

Storage Startup Kaminario Scores $25 Million In VC Funding

Solid-state storage vendor Kaminario has secured a $25 million Series D round of venture capital, bringing its total funding to date to $65 million. Kaminario released its flagship solid-state Flash and DRAM SAN storage solution, the Kaminario K2, in 2010. It features a scale-out architecture that allows dynamic load balancing, automatic distribution of data across the system and high availability as capacity is increased.