Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, December 21st, 2007

Billy Marshall from rPath on the upcoming certification nightmare

Interesting blog post starting here and then a followup here regarding an impending nightmare of certification nonsense that virtualization can bring. The permutations of all possible options will simply be impossible to close a business case for full certification and support of entire stacks - will appliances be the answer? It’s not clear yet, but I expect for certain user segments it should be on the short list.

It seems that I wrote what lots of people have been thinking when I proclaimed that certification is a weak promise at best — a hoax at worst — with most customers spending 6X their license costs on installation, maintenance, and administration of “certified” software. The pity of this whole situation is that software vendors are also paying a high price for the myriad of customer preferences regarding middleware and operating systems. And the price is about to get a lot steeper.