Many of the exciting innovations I am seeing are in fact not focused on the server tier at all; or, at least not directly. In many ways the trends are moving decidedly "up-stack", beyond the hypervisor and VM management to the application and desktop tiers of the computing infrastructure. Enter players like Thinstall (purchased by VMware), Xenocode, and Softricity (purchased by Microsoft).
Among the more interesting solutions I have come across is InstallFree, which has developed a zero install application infrastructure for deploying and accessing virtualized applications. InstallFree's solution facilitates integration between applications (for example, opening an Excel attachment within Outlook), a feature that is largely missing from its competitors in the space. Another interesting facet of InstallFree's solution is maintaining centralized management of things such as user profiles and data, permissions, preferences, and application settings. Although execution of application happens locally, the company's bi-directional streaming capability facilitates writing a user's settings and preferences back to the centralized application management infrastructure, so that when a user logs into his or her applications from a new machine, the settings transfer seamlessly. An additional key differentiator is InstallFree's ability to integrate with most of the management systems on the market today, minimizing the need to significantly change a company's existing application deployment/management infrastructure.
I expect continued and rapid innovation at the application and deskop tiers of the virtual compute stack. Interestingly, despite the initial hype of VDI, many of the interesting start-ups in this area are focused not on a fully-centralized, hosted solution; rather, they take advantage of de-centralized processing within a centralized management paradigm. Watch for these types of hybrid solutions that alleviate the need for fork-lift, rip-and-replace-type investments that may be too much of a hurdle for organizations to overcome. Hybrid solutions leverage existing infrastructure while at the same time adding the benefits of Cloud Computing, such as flexibility, portability, simplified management and enhanced security, not to mention total cost of ownership savings for enterprises.
