Most computer industry companies would feel satisfied with ruling the highly lucrative and technically complex search engine advertising market -- but not Google.

As the search giant celebrates its 10th anniversary of incorporation this month, riding a years-long bonanza from its search business, it is also a scrappy underdog with lofty aspirations in the world of software for workplaces.

As such, Google, the unmatched consumer search engine champion, must compete against seasoned and formidable IT providers like Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM. This is no small undertaking, requiring a long-term commitment and heavy investments, while facing real risks.

The jury is still out on whether it's wise for Google to invest significant resources in providing software for enterprise search, office productivity, mapping, collaboration and communication.

It's estimated that about 98 percent of the company's revenue comes from consumer search advertising, making the company's Enterprise unit a small side business currently, at least from a dollar perspective.

Industry observers recommend that IT and business managers keep this in mind as a risk factor when considering buying enterprise products from Google.

Although Google maintains it is committed long term to its enterprise products, it isn't unheard of for large companies to change course and pull out of non-core businesses with little advanced notice.

The warning should be heeded particularly by CIOs in large companies contemplating a major investment in products such as the Google Apps Premier hosted communication and collaboration suite.

"I would absolutely ask that question," said Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz. "As long as 98 percent of Google's revenue comes from other sources, this question of whether they're in [enterprise software] for the long term will always come up. This isn't their core business."

Burton Group analyst Guy Creese concurs. "In its heart of hearts, Google wants to succeed as a provider of software to large enterprises, but they haven't yet signaled that it's a do-or-die kind of thing," Creese said.

The highest-profile product in Google's Enterprise unit is Apps, whose free versions have proven very popular with individuals, small and medium-size businesses and educational institutions.

Google could have opted to just target universities and SMBs with the Standard and Education editions of Apps, generating revenue from advertising. It could also have been content to lure SMBs to the Premier version, which is a very affordable option at $50 per user per year, when compared to Microsoft Office and Exchange.

"The things preventing Google from being attractive to enterprises aren't necessarily big issues for SMBs," Creese said.

Google could rake in robust revenue from SMBs, which are often underserved by major vendors and hold off on purchasing IT products that they need but aren't priced right for them, Koplowitz said. "There's a lot of money to be made there," he said.

This accounts for much of the success Google has had with its Search Appliance and Google Mini, which have disrupted the enterprise search market, where systems have traditionally been pricey and complicated to install, manage, and use. Priced aggressively and built with a low-maintenance, plug-and-play design, those products have hit a sweet spot with SMBs and schools.

The University of Florida in Gainsville has been using the Search Appliance since 2002 and currently has two of them to index its entire public Web presence -- from its main site to individual college and department sites and Web servers from specific research teams.

"The appliance has always been easy to set up and maintain. The administrative interface gives a very clear overview of how the appliance sees your Web sites, and makes it easy to update the index," said Daniel Westermann-Clark, Web developer at the university.

According to Google, more than 500,000 organizations have signed up for Google Apps, totaling more than 10 million end users, of which "hundreds of thousands" are using Premier.

However, Google has made it clear it has its sights set on large companies as well, recently releasing a newly architected version of the Search Appliance that can index more than three times as many documents as the current model and improves the product's IT management functions.

But it's the Apps Premier expectations that are riding particularly high. As CIOs warm up to the SaaS (software-as-a-service) approach of application delivery as an option to the traditional on-premise model, Google sees a big opportunity to take business away from Microsoft's Office/Exchange and from IBM's Notes/Domino and rake in big bucks.

In fact, a big motivation behind Google's development of Chrome, a major two-year project involving significant investment, was to create a browser optimized for next-generation Web applications like the ones in Apps Premier.

Google is far from alone, as Yahoo's Zimbra, Cisco's WebEx, Zoho, and others beef up their own hosted collaboration and communication suites, while Microsoft and IBM are taking steps to protect their turf.

In its enterprise aspirations, Google has other disadvantages. Unlike Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce.com, Google doesn't have a large list of enterprise clients, nor does it have as much experience courting CIOs and catering to their requirements, including prompt, individual attention throughout a product's lifecycle.

While Google has strengthened Apps Premier's IT control features, particularly with its purchase of e-mail security and management expert Postini, the suite still lacks features that large enterprises often require. For example, Google only offers an uptime guarantee for Gmail, not for the other components, and the company admits that the feature set of its applications lags behind Office's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, while Apps' calendaring and contact management features are often cited as weak. Apps has only partial support for offline access to its applications, a popular request.

"Google hasn't been able to put together a set of features that are important enough to enterprises to make them shift," Creese says.

Thus, CIOs aren't rushing to adopt Apps Premier, and those who decide to deploy it are opting to do so for a limited set of users and for operations that aren't critical to the business. This is true even among CIOs who have embraced SaaS applications as viable alternatives to on-premise software.

Health-care company The Schumacher Group has used hosted applications successfully for well over two years from vendors such as Salesforce.com and Oracle's PeopleSoft, and is now about to deploy Apps Premier, but not as a replacement to its Exchange/Office environment, which its about 750 full-time employees use.

Instead, The Schumacher Group, which provides management services for hospital emergency rooms, plans to buy Apps Premier licenses for the about 2,400 physicians and nurses that it works with as independent contractors.

"We'll use Apps Premier to create an environment that doesn't exist now, but as far as replacing Exchange and Office, we're not at that level yet," said The Schumacher Group CIO Douglas Menefee.

Part of the problem is that Apps Premier can't meet the company's regulatory compliance requirements for handling patient data, Menefee said. However, it looks like a good option to provide e-mail, calendar and office collaboration software at a low cost and in a convenient hosted manner to these doctors and nurses, he said.

The decision to go with Apps Premier, as opposed to another hosted option, is 99 percent certain, barring any architectural problems that might prevent the users from accessing the software through the hospitals' networks. A pilot phase with portion of the doctors may start in about a month, he said.

And so as Google celebrates its 10th birthday and its unquestionable dominance of the search engine ad market, which has propelled it to stratospheric financial success, it looks at a major challenge and unanswered questions in enterprise software.

"It's hard to break into the enterprise business," Koplowitz said. "Will Google sign those big customers that represent big revenue and continued investment in this area? Google certainly can afford it, but that doesn't mean they won't decide to refocus their resources in their core business. That's definitely a fair question to ask of Google. I don't think Google is having cold feet yet but time will tell if they're in this for the long term."

Adobe Systems in October plans to launch a private pilot program for its "Genesis" mashup technology, which provides a desktop client uniting multiple tasks in a single workspace.

The pilot project will provide Genesis to selected customers and partners, with 100 to 200 people set to test it, said Matthias Zeller, group product manager for corporate development at Adobe, in an interview at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Friday. A more widespread beta program is eyed for some point in the future.

With Genesis, Adobe is aiming to save users from having to open up multiple windows to access various applications; Genesis, which is just a code name, provides a unified user experience for each specific project. Serving as an alternative to portals, Genesis offers business users links to enterprise applications, business intelligence, documents, and Web applications. Content can be shared with other users. Instant messaging, VoIP, and video collaboration are supported as well.

"It's a mashup on the client," Zeller said. Users can make a "mini-portals on the desktop," he said.

Genesis is built with Adobe's Flex technology and deployed on the desktop via Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). Supported on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, the client is developed with Flex and compiles into Adobe's Flash software.

Users, for example, could bring together a Salesforce.com application with PowerPoint materials and Google searches. "Today, you do all that separately," requiring many windows, said Zeller.

"The idea in Genesis is bring all these windows into a workspace, which is persistent on your desktop," he said. The desktop leverages drag-and-drop capabilities. The Genesis user experience takes cues from products such as Adobe Photoshop Express for assembling content.

Also featured in Genesis is the notion of content catalogs, to be provided by enterprise users themselves or Adobe partners. The company plans to work with other vendors to develop these catalogs. Adobe already is working with Business Objects regarding development of BI dashboards.

"The whole concept of Genesis relies on an ecosystem of partners and end-users to provide content for it," Zeller said.

Adobe has not set precise product release plans for Genesis. But plans call for users to access the client for free and subscribe to Adobe's Acrobat.com hosted service to handle collaboration.

The disk storage industry defied economic gloom in the second quarter with strong increases in both capacity sold and revenue, according to two research companies.

Worldwide revenue from external disk storage systems grew 16.7 percent in the quarter, the fastest year-over-year increase that market has seen in two years, IDC said on Friday. Meanwhile, total disk storage systems revenue grew 10.9 percent, according to IDC. Vendors shipped 1,777 petabytes of capacity in total, up 43.7 percent from a year earlier.

[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage Report newsletter. ]

Sales growth was remarkable especially because it occurred across several market segments, IDC said in a news release.

Despite economic slowdowns in some parts of the world, storage demand has been growing rapidly, driven in part by increased use of video and by regulations that force enterprises to preserve more data. IDC has estimated overall demand for storage capacity is growing by about 60 percent per year.

IDC defines a disk storage system as a set of storage elements associated with three or more disks. Some are located inside server cabinets and some are external. While the total disk storage system market hit $6.9 billion in revenue in the second quarter, the external market grew to $5.08 billion.

EMC kept its lead in external disk storage systems with 21.7 percent of the market, followed by IBM and Hewlett-Packard in a statistical tie with 13.1 percent and 12.9 percent, respectively. EMC's revenue grew fastest among the major vendors, up 19.7 percent to $1.101 billion from $920 billion a year earlier. HP's growth rate was lowest, at 8.2 percent, and the company lost a full percentage point in market share.

In the total disk storage systems market, HP fared even worse with a 1.2 percent drop in revenue, while all other major vendors gained. Though HP remained in the lead, it fell to an 18.1 percent market share, nearly tied with IBM at 17.7 percent. EMC was in third place and Dell in fourth. Sun Microsystems had the strongest rise in revenue, at 29.2 percent. Its revenue grew to $494 million and its market share to 7.1 percent.

According to figures from research company Gartner, the external controller-based disk storage market grew 18.8 percent in the second quarter, reaching $4.46 billion in revenue. EMC lost half a percentage point of market share but maintained a commanding lead at 24.3 percent, experiencing 16 percent revenue growth in the quarter. Next was IBM with 14.1 percent of the market, followed by HP, Dell, and Hitachi Data Systems. NetApp came in sixth but had a strong 22.9 percent revenue gain, Gartner said.

Sun's revenue shot up 34.7 percent in the quarter, according to Gartner, which attributed the gain to its StorageTek 2000-, 6000-, and 9000-series products. The relative newcomer to storage, which entered the market through StorageTek and other acquisitions, had 6.6 percent of the market.

Gartner found the Japanese market leading in growth, with revenue up 38.7 percent from a year earlier, followed by Latin America with 25.2 percent. Europe, the Middle East and Africa had growth of 22.3 percent, and the Asia-Pacific region grew 16.6 percent. North America trailed all other regions with 12.7 percent growth, according to Gartner.

Microsoft Friday renamed the next major release of BizTalk server and committed to releasing major updates to the business process management server line ever two years or less.

Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in Microsoft's connected systems division, said the company changed the name of the name of the next version from BizTalk Server 2006 R3 to BizTalk Server 2009 to indicate that its a major release. The new version is slated to ship during the first half of next year, he added.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 was made generally available last September.

"[Users] want more transparency," Kawasaki said. "As they're doing more and more with our technology, they want to be able to plan for future releases. We're trying to provide much more transparency about where we're going with BizTalk."

Kawasaki went on to outline the major new features planned for the 2009 release and for the follow-on major release, now referred to as BizTalk Server 7.

The 2009 release, he said, will add support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008, and the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 as well as bolstered connectivity and better developer productivity tools.

On the connectivity front, the server will include a new Web services registry, new business adapters, better host systems integration, and enhanced business activity monitoring, Microsoft said. It will also include improved support for EDI and AS2 protocols for business-to-business connectivity, Kawasaki added.

For developers, BizTalk 2009 adds support for Microsoft's Team Foundation Server and provides development teams with integrated source control, bug tracking, Project Server integration, and support for team development.

Microsoft plans to focus on developer productivity and visibility in BizTalk Server 7, Kawasaki added. For example, Microsoft hopes to provide an easier way to do automated mapping between systems and protocols to speed connectivity. Release 7 will also focus on asset management to support remote devices beyond RFID readers, he added.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Google garnered headlines all week with its new Chrome browser. Rival Microsoft announced it will release just four patches next Tuesday, but that may not be cause to think the day will be an easy one for those responsible for keeping systems patched. On the virtualization front, HP launched a product-and-services blitz this week, while VMware picked up a Microsoft certification. Otherwise, a warning was issued about new trickery from spammers, and in case we all weren't aware of it by now, social-networking sites could be ripe for malware.

1. Continuing coverage: Google's Chrome browser: Google offered up a Labor Day holiday surprise when it inadvertently posted a look at its new Chrome browser at an unofficial company blog. Google then made the news official later in the day and released the browser, which shifts the landscape of that market, in beta on Tuesday. Reviewers found the Chrome browser fast, functional, and, following the Google home-page pattern, with a stripped-down look. By week's end, though, the first security problems had surfaced.

2. Upcoming Microsoft patch lineup could be 'massive,' says researcher: A word of warning for next week -- don't assume that because Microsoft is releasing only four patches this month that it will be a snap to deal with them. "It's not going to be an easy month, what with all these different applications and different operating systems affected. Patching will be a lot more involved than you'd think with just four bulletins," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. The job of applying the patches could be "potentially massive," he said.

3. Researchers build malicious Facebook application: A research team built a malicious Facebook program to show the perils of social-networking applications. Their experiment shows how easy it could be for a miscreant to trick a big group of users into downloading an application that seems harmless, but that contains malicious code.

4. Should IT form a union?: Demands on IT workers keep piling up, and they have to labor under the constant threat of having their jobs outsourced. Is it time for IT workers to unionize in order to demand better working conditions? Perhaps, but the idea could also be a tough sell in the "lone gunman" ethos of IT work.

5. Sony recalls 73,000 Vaio laptops due to burn hazard: Sony recalled 73,000 Vaio TZ laptops because a manufacturing defect could cause them to overheat in some circumstances. Wiring near the hinge of the computer models could short circuit, Sony said. One person has suffered a minor burn and Sony has gotten 15 additional reports about computers overheating.

6. Spammers use free Web services to shield links: Spammers are using free Web services to try to make the spam links they send out look more legitimate, according to MessageLabs. Photo-hosting sites and the like are being used by spammers who are taking advantages of various features offered as part of free services, the e-mail security vendor has found.

7. HP launches product blitz for virtualization: Responding to survey findings that show most businesses aren't making the most of what virtualization has to offer, HP introduced several new products aimed at both desktop and server virtualization. Besides the hardware, including a new ProLiant server and desktop thin clients, HP is alos offering virtualization consulting services.

8. VMware's ESX certified for Microsoft support, deployment: Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program has issued its first certification with VMware's ESX hypervisor receiving the honors. The certification means that VMware's product will work with Microsoft's Windows Server and other software. It also means that ESX users will be able to receive tech support from both companies.

9. Internet traffic growth slowing, research firm shows: Remember the alarming reports that the Internet is going to collapse under the weight of its own data, especially as more video goes online? Well ... for the second year in a row, international Internet capacity grew at a quicker pace than Internet traffic, according to TeleGeography. International Internet traffic grew 53 percent from the middle of last year to the middle of this year, compared to 61 percent in the prior year. Between 2007 and 2008, average traffic utilization levels on the Internet dropped to 29 percent from 31 percent, with peak utilization decreasing from 44 percent to 43 percent, the market-tracking firm found.

10. Cheaters: Inside the hidden world of IT certification fraud: A group of IT hardware and software vendors have joined with independent certifying agencies, test centers and some others to create the IT Certification Council in an effort to share information to keep certification fraud from occurring. Certification cheating is apparently a dirty little IT secret that the council seeks to bring into the open.

Can a business be run solely in the cloud without a server anywhere in sight? Appirio says it can and is already doing it.

Starting out with four people two years ago and growing to nearly 100 employees, the company relies on cloud-based, on-demand software from Google and Salesforce.com, said Narinder Singh, founder and chief marketing officer at Appirio. The company provides products and services to accelerate adoption of on-demand services.

"Today, our company continues to run its entire business in the cloud. There's no servers inside Appirio," Singh said during a presentation at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Thursday afternoon.

The company uses Google Docs to collaborate on a day-to-day basis and Salesforce.com for such tasks as an employee recruitment system. Human resources, IT asset management, and financial systems also run in the cloud. Google Sites, providing secure Web sites, is used for collaborating with customers.

Annual IT costs per employee for hardware and software at Appirio are less than $1,000, as opposed to the $6,000 to $12,000 per employee that was spent at SAP when Singh worked there, he stressed. With cloud-based computing, large and small companies have access to the same infrastructure, Singh said. The core infrastructure will scale as Appirio grows, he said.

"We even manage the subscription process of how we actually look at licensing our customers inside of Salesforce," Singh said.

While acknowledging the risks that Google's applications and Salesforce.com are not immune to system failures, Singh nonetheless stressed the high uptime rates, estimating that Salesforce.com is has better than a 99.9 percent uptime rate. Appirio expects these uptimes to increase, he said. Appirio had pondered building redundant systems for some customers and process areas but has not acquired this capability, Singh said.

Appirio at the conference introduced Premium and Personal editions of its Sync tools intended to make individuals more productive. These tools provide synchronization for Google and Salesforce.com so users can more easily connect to their day-to-day productivity tools, the company said.

The company also now offers a package service to help prototype business models using on-demand platforms. The Business Model Prototyping service is based on a four-to-eight week engagement for executives at large and mid-sized businesses.

Dell's new netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9, will be sold with built-in mobile broadband by Vodafone, the companies announced on Thursday. The deal is part of a growing trend, as operators try to find new growth opportunities.

Dell's entry in the growing netbook space weighs in at just over 1 kilogram, and has an 8.9-inch LED display. Like some of its competitors it has an SSD (solid-state disk) for storage, holding up to 16GB.

[ For more on products in the hot mini-notebook category, check out our hands-on looks at Asus' Eee PC 901 and 1000, the Cloudbook Max netbook, Elitegroup's G10IL mini-laptop, MSI's Wind low-cost laptop, Giga-byte's M912X mini-laptop, HP's Mini-Note netbook, and Acer's Aspire one. ]

The Vodafone version of the netbook supports download speeds up to 7.2Mbps and upload speeds up to 2Mbps, using HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) and HSUPA (High-Speed Uplink Packet Access), according to company spokesman Ben Taylor. The Mini 9 also comes equipped with support for Wi-Fi.

Vodafone will start selling the Mini 9 later this month, but has not yet said in which countries it will offer the netbook. For now its "in key European markets," the operator said.

Vodafone will announce pricing later, but if you just want the netbook, it sells elsewhere for from £299 ($526) in the United Kingdom. A version with Ubuntu's version of the Linux operating system, with a user interface customized by Dell, will also go on sale with a starting price of £269. Vodafone isn't announcing which operating system it has picked, or if both will be available, according to Taylor.

Vodafone is far from alone in its interest in the laptop market. In just the last couple of weeks Orange, Telenor, and TeliaSonera have also announced similar plans.

As growth has flattened in areas including voice, SMS (Short Message Service), and roaming, operators have been forced to look elsewhere, and the addition of laptops to their offerings is a no-brainer, according to Shaun Collins, managing director at CCS Insight. "For the operator it's all additional business, there are for example no interconnect costs it has to share with others," said Collins, who thinks that next year laptops will grow to be as important to operators as mobile phones.

But it's not just the operators who have learned to value laptops. Laptop manufacturers have also realized that the mobile broadband market is a growth opportunity for them as well, and are more open to making deals, according to Collins.

The market is still in its infancy, and for the next couple of years there will be a land-grab, as operators fight over the customer base, according to Collins. "Then we'll start to see some differentiation," said Collins, as operators start to take advantage of the open nature of PCs, and add software to guide users to their own offerings.

A team of researchers have built a malicious Facebook program an experiment to demonstrate the possible dangers of social networking applications.

The experiment shows the ease with which attackers could dupe large number of users into downloading a seemingly harmless application that actually performs a clandestine attack that can cripple a Web site.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

Facebook and other Web sites such as MySpace, Bebo, and Google are creating technology platforms that let third-party developers build applications to run on those sites. The concept has opened the door to innovation, but also prompted worries over how those applications could be used for spam or steal personal data.

The researchers developed an application called "Photo of the Day," which serves up a new National Geographic photo daily. But in the background, every time the application is clicked, it sends a 600K HTTP request for images to a victim's Web site.

Those requests, as well as those images, are not seen by someone using Photo of the Day, which the researchers have termed a "Facebot" application. The effect is a flood of traffic to the victim's Web site, known as a DoS attack.

The researchers uploaded their application to Facebook in January and told a few colleagues about it. Even without advertising or other promotion, close to 1,000 people installed it in their profiles, much to the researchers' surprise.

They then monitored traffic on a Web site they set up for Photo of the Day to attack. If those traffic figures were applied to Facebook applications that have a million or more users, they estimated a victim's Web site could be bombarded by as much as 23Mbps of traffic, or 248GB of unwanted data per day.

"Facebook applications have a highly-distributed platform with significant attack firepower under their control," wrote the researchers.

The malicious Facebot could also be rigged for other nefarious duties. An attacker could create an application that uses JavaScript and HTTP requests to figure out if a particular host has certain ports open, they wrote. Another possibility is to construct an application that delivers a malicious link in order to infect a Web site with malware.

Since Facebook applications can get access to users' personal details, it would also be possible for the application to grab all of those details and post them to a remote server, they wrote.

However, social networking sites can take measures to prevent bad applications, the researchers said. One remedy is ensuring that applications can't interact with hosts that aren't part of the social network. New applications should also be vigorously verified by the social networking site. APIs should be crafted so as not to allow too much interaction with the rest of the Internet.

Photo of the Day is still listed on Facebook, with its authorship attributed to Andreas Makridakis, one of the researchers. The application has 543 users now, with several comments praising it.

The study was published by the Foundation for Research and Technology in Heraklion, Greece, and the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore.

Sun Microsystems will introduce a storage appliance based on its FISHworks software package by the end of this year and later extend the technology to other types of products through partnerships.

FISHworks is a set of software components for building specialized appliances on industry-standard x86 hardware. Though it runs best on Sun equipment and the company's OpenSolaris open-source operating system, the software theoretically could work on other platforms, according to Sun.

[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage Report newsletter. ]

The idea behind FISHworks is to offer the all-in-one simplicity of an appliance, fully tested and configured, with open-source software and commodity hardware. FISHworks stands for Fully Integrated Software and Hardware, but will get a new name when it is commercially released, said Mike Shapiro, a distinguished engineer in Sun's FISHworks group.

The platform was announced in February 2007 and had been expected earlier this year, but Sun said it has been fine-tuning it so it's a fully baked product when it hits the market. The company joins a growing list of big vendors working on virtual appliance platforms, including IBM, VMware, Red Hat, and Novell, according to IDC analyst Brett Waldman. Unlike conventional appliances, virtual ones aren't tied to a particular hardware system.

Sun is using FISHworks in a reinvention of its storage products around its own intellectual property, after selling storage products it brought on through acquisitions for several years, Shapiro said. The high-performance NAS (network-attached storage) appliances coming later this year will be designed for large enterprises. FISHworks will use Sun's ZFS (Zettabyte File System) storage software, which has distinctive Sun features including an analytics tool that uses the company's DTrace (Dynamic Tracing) technology.

The DTrace-based tool is more powerful than any other such tool in the industry for telling IT managers what is working or not, according to Sun. For example, it can drill down to tell an administrator which protocol is consuming the most resources on a storage network, which clients are using that protocol the most and which files they are working with, and more, Shapiro said. This would help IT managers troubleshoot problems such as boot-up times for virtual servers that get longer over time, he said.

Some time after rolling out the NAS appliances, Sun will offer the software components as an "appliance kit" for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to build their own products. As an example, Sun pointed to Dell, which today licenses Windows 2003 for some of its storage gear. Using OpenSolaris would save that licensing cost, according to Sun. In addition, enterprises could use software components to build their own systems if they chose.

In storage, Sun is going after a fast-growing industry that is fairly new territory for the company. Enterprises are looking for a simple finished solution, so coming out with storage appliances based on this platform is probably a good move, said Andrew Reichman, an analyst with Forrester Research. So far, Sun's storage lineup has been a mishmash, he said.

"While Sun does have interesting and valuable pieces ... they have not put it together to be a very compelling offer," Reichman said.

Even with the appliances, it will be hard for the company to catch up to big names such as EMC and NetApp, he added.

"Storage is a (market) where you've got to have experience and expertise and develop a relationship over time," Reichman said. "People buy storage for reputation and solidity ... much more than they do for a low-cost solution."

A vendor such as Dell, which lacks a strong enterprise-class NAS product, might find FISHworks a worthwhile option, said Taneja Group analyst Arun Taneja. It will all come down to dollars and cents, he said -- information that's not yet available.

If there is any doubt that vendors want to poke desktop virtualization into the psyche of corporate IT, then last week's rash of vendor announcements should put all that to rest.

Microsoft, Red Hat, HP, and Sun all moved to improve their standing in terms of enterprise desktop virtualization software.

[ Stay up to date on the latest virtualization developments with InfoWorld's Virtualization Report blog and newsletter. ]

Microsoft, in a move to shore up its ongoing virtualized desktop story, announced that App-V 4.5 has been completed and that it will be included in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2008 R2, which is set for release in a few weeks.

App-V (formerly Softgrid) lets users package applications up into "containers," store them on a server where they can be centrally managed, and then stream those containers to desktops, devices, or shared PCs.

Microsoft has been pushing what it calls the Optimized Desktop, which addresses centralized management and deployment of physical and virtual resources.

With App-V 4.5, which is the first version developed under the company's Trustworthy Computing and Secure by Default guidelines, Microsoft introduced integration with System Center management tools, including the System Center Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack for App-V 4.5 servers. The software also features Dynamic Suite Composition (DSC), which lets virtualized applications share middleware resources; support for 11 languages; and a service-provider license option called Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Hosting for Desktops.

Microsoft also announced that Citrix is releasing a version of Citrix XenDesktop that will integrate with System Center Virtual Machine Manager when that software ships later this month. 

Red Hat rounds upMeanwhile, Red Hat extended its virtualization wares to the desktop by acquiring vendor Qumranet, which develops a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform called SolidICE.

The technology is based on a Linux kernel technology called Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), which Qumranet wrote and then took open source.

SolidICE provides IT with centralized desktop and image management, high availability, and provisioning for any desktop operating system.

Red Hat said the privately held Qumranet's development, test and support staff, including those that lead the KVM project, will join Red Hat.

The company said in a statement its long-term goal is to infuse servers and desktops with virtualization technology that is built into the operating system.

In a statement, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said, "Put simply, Qumranet's KVM and VDI technologies are at the forefront of the next generation of virtualization."

Meanwhile, HP announced that it was upgrading its HP Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform with the HP VDI Citrix XenDesktop. HP said the Citrix version could be used for entry-level implementations up to enterprisewide desktop delivery.

XenDesktop uses virtual machine technology to deliver the Windows desktop from a central server to network clients. XenDesktop gives the IT staff the ability to centrally managed desktops. HP also said its will offer "Citrix Ready" blade PCs and thin clients.

Sun tooSun introduced Version 2.0 of xVM VirtualBox, which lets users load virtual machines onto a desktop and install the operating system of their choice. VirtualBox 2.0 adds support for 64-bit Windows Vista and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and features new platform support options and performance enhancements.

The Macintosh and Sun Solaris versions were upgraded with network performance enhancements. Sun also has improved performance on AMD-based PCs.

Sun also introduced xVM VirtualBox Software Enterprise Subscription, around-the-clock premium support that starts at $30 per user per year.

The IDG News Service contributed to this report. Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.