VMworld 2007 has come and gone leaving us with many positive insights for the future of the industry. Michael Bilancieri, our Director of Products, attended the event and was rather impressed with the turnout as well as the growth in the “virtual eco system.”

As like last year, the business continuity, disaster recovery and high-availability protection-related sessions were well over sold and left many people unable to attend, indicating that this is one of the most prolific topics on the minds of customers.

The folks at VMware demo’d their R&D continuous availability project which was met with oohs and aahs from the audience clearly validating the need for solutions like this in the market. Continuous availability, or more specifically fault-tolerant availability in a virtual environment in Marathons’ case, is no small feat.

Interestingly enough Michael did have a conversation with an end-user industry veteran that stopped by our booth (seen below). He had been perusing the show and said that the everRun technology showcase was the most innovative thing that he’s seen in quite some time. He went on to say that in the availability/data protection space, innovation is typically incremental and is relegated to status quo paradigm views of the world.

Other insights come from our friends at XenSource who have done an incredible job enabling the ecosystem as evidenced by the number of software vendors supporting or soon to support XenSource. All in all we want to say kudos to VMware for building this market and opening up this event to all the virtualization players.

Next up: VMworld Europe in Cannes, France