January 12, 2007

Proofpoint and VMware – an apparently non-trivial virtual appliance success story

I talked with Proofpoint today, and got a more positive view about VMware’s virtual appliance strategy than I’ve gotten from other appliance vendors. They cite over 500 downloads in the past couple of months, of which a significant fraction have turned into actual sales. Specific deployment scenarios they mentioned include:

It probably is not coincidental that Proofpoint makes less use of custom hardware that many other appliance vendors. In most cases, Proofpoint just buys servers from a vendor such as Dell and fiddles with their packaging. For some applications it does add enhanced networking capabilities, as other appliance vendors do; while I neglected to ask explicitly, I got the impression these weren’t the ones commonly deployed on VMware.

Proofpoint said that very few of its customers bought VMware in connection with their Proofpoint deployments; except in a couple of cases, they already had it and were using it for other things.

Comments

4 Responses to “Proofpoint and VMware – an apparently non-trivial virtual appliance success story”

  1. Proofpoint and VMWare success in virtual appliances at Virtualization Daily on January 23rd, 2007 11:46 pm

    […] The Monash Report is reporting on the success of the VMWare virtual appliance program and the Proofpoint antispam appliance. I talked with Proofpoint today, and got a more positive view about VMware’s virtual appliance strategy than I’ve gotten from other appliance vendors. They cite over 500 downloads in the past couple of months, of which a significant fraction have turned into actual sales. […]

  2. DBMS2 — DataBase Management System Services»Blog Archive » And then there were two: DATAllegro seems to be going with standard hardware on January 27th, 2007 3:33 am

    […] Actually, I don’t know whether DATAllegro is acquiring Dell boards, mucking around with them a bit, sticking its own nameplate on, and still telling customers it’s a Dell system. That technical strategy would be reminiscent of Proofpoint’s, for example, albeit with a different marketing/branding choice. But I’m guessing that DATAllegro has gone to a pure software offering – i.e., a “virtual appliance” in Check Point Software’s sense of the term rather than VMware’s. […]

  3. The Monash Report»Blog Archive » Appliances — my conclusions! (For now, at least) on January 29th, 2007 10:23 am

    […] Type 2 is where most appliance vendors ideally would want to be. Examples can already be found in data warehousing, antispam, and firewall. Also, a variety of platform vendors are interested in supporting virtual appliances, including VMware, Microsoft, maybe IBM, and Crossbeam. Crossbeam’s strategy may be the most interesting of all. • • • […]

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