Fitzgerald claims the big victim with this move will be middleware providers such as IBM, which have multi-billion businesses helping connect information in huge enterprises. While he’s aware the licensing support revenue for open-source software can be a tenth of the original value of the software, he says, “It’s new revenue to us and old revenue to them, and a billion looks pretty good to us.”
However the most immediate victims may well be the existing PaaS players such as Salesforce.com, Google and a string of startups that have been building out products in this space around specific languages. Salesforce, which works with VMware in a joint PaaS called VMforce, suddenly has some serious competition that can interoperate with apps on the Salesforce.com platform as well as any others. VMforce will still exist, but now it looks like a walled garden.
(Full Story: VMware Launches Open-Source Cloud: CloudFoundry)