Description
One aspect of my day job is to advise startups on how to make it out there in the wild world of the virtualization industry. One of my most frequent points of analysis is whether or not what the startup has created is, in the medium term, a feature or a product. Increasingly, the lack of a marketplace is a locus of discussion.
When I’m talking about a marketplace in the context of virtualization, I’m talking about a marketplace for buying or subscribing to virtual appliances. Many public cloud providers have them; you can deploy all sorts of workloads on a public cloud with just a few clicks. Some of these are free to use, and some must be licenced.
A virtualization marketplace is, essentially, an app store for virtual workloads.
While it might seem obvious that this is a useful tool, it’s surprising how much resistance there is to the concept. Marketplaces are a lot of work, and they can be a significant expense. The administrative effort far outweighs the technical requirements, and it isn’t something a lot of startups are looking to commit to. Despite this, I fear that those who don’t choose to built a marketplace will be lost to history.