The other day I was catching up with Serge Hyppolite, director of interaction product management at Aspect, about the company's foray into virtualization. This comes in the form of work with VMware to run Aspect application software on servers portioned using VMware's hypervisor technology. My more detailed thoughts on the subject can be found here (Current Analysis password required, I'm afraid), but wanted to take some time to address the question that bugged me most about the announcement: "Why VMware?"You see, I would have expected Microsoft to be Aspect's partner in this area. After all, I can think of no other major communications company that has been so transformed by its relationship with the folks in Redmond than Aspect. Not even the long-lived Innovative Communications Alliance changed Nortel to the degree that the Microsoft relationship changed Aspect. The company's recent UC World Live virtual conference often seemed more about Microsoft's Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 unified communications software than all that Aspect is capable of delivering in the contact center space. There was no mention, however, of Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor that competes directly with Citrix XenServer and VMware vSphere 4. So why didn't Aspect base its software virtualization initiative on Hyper-V?
The answer mainly lies in the length of time Aspect has been working on support for vSphere 4 and VMware Infrastructure 3. This has been ongoing for about a year and a half, which doesn't exactly predate the alliance with Microsoft, but places it at its very early days when the topic of hypervisors probably didn't factor into most conversations between the companies. (Hyper-V would not actually become generally available until a few months after Microsoft and Aspect entered into their alliance.) At that time Aspect customers were already playing around with running various Aspect applications on virtual machines, much like Genesys and Cisco customers were also doing at the time. They (Aspect's customers) pretty much all used VMware to virtualize other applications, so it made sense for Aspect to formally announce VMware support first.
That's right, first. Serge says Aspect is actively working on support for the Microsoft hypervisor as well. The integration is presently in proof-of-concept stage, with Aspect's performance management, workforce management and other software running with Hyper-V in laboratory environments and demo systems. He's hoping to make Hyper-V support generally available to Aspect customers in the second half of next year. With hypervisor support still more of a curiosity among developers of business communications solutions, giving one's customers a choice in virtualization options is some pretty forward thinking on Aspect's part.
Separately, this was not the first time VMware unexpectedly crossed the path of this industry analyst whose typical workday is thankfully free of terms like hypervisor, Synthetic Interrupt Controller, parent partition (I could have used one of those as a teenager), I/O Memory Management Unit (IOMMU...and I thought communications technology acronyms sound ludicrous). Back in June Mitel made its big VMware announcement. The company can run its reporting, unified communication and management software on virtual servers now, with messaging, conferencing, and teleworker coming when Mitel's support for VMware is made generally available in early 2010. It's expected that other PBX developers will likewise be able to run their communications software on virtual machines, with the upcoming version 8 of Cisco's Unified Communications Manager rumored to support VMware.
