Virtualization Journal thought it was time to go in search of industry insights into this fast-growing new IT market, and so we asked some of its new and up-and-coming executives for their thoughts on some of the trends emerging already in 2008. First, in view of the memo released recently by the SVP of its Server and Tools Business, Bob Muglia, we asked about what Microsoft's intentions might be. Is it going to try and play catch-up with VMware in 2008 by acquiring Citrix, for example?

When back in 2005 we asked our globe-girdling network of industry executives, enterprise architects, software engineers, technology evangelists, analysts, and VCs to pinpoint what they thought the Next Big Thing would be, only one respondent singled out Virtualization and that was software industry legend Mitchell Kertzman, of San Francisco-based VC firm Hummer Winblad.

When back in 2005 we asked our globe-girdling network of industry executives, enterprise architects, software engineers, technology evangelists, analysts, and VCs to pinpoint what they thought the Next Big Thing would be, only one respondent singled out Virtualization and that was software industry legend Mitchell Kertzman, of San Francisco-based VC firm Hummer Winblad.

Storage is still one of the most costly and fastest-growing aspects of everyone's network and is likely to remain so for some time. Every network user is a storage user. We're all part of a community that shares the costs and the benefits of this expensive resource. Storage management can be a challenging task. There's so much hardware, so many alternatives, and so many issues that it's easy to get lost in the details and fail to see the forest for the trees.

Okay, 2005 is over. Let's get back to work...But first, let's look at what's new. Microsoft has taken WinFS, its new file system, out of the first release of its next operating system. The story is that WinFS will follow soon after the OS releases. For most of us, this is something we don't need to worry about for a couple of years, at least.

Storage always seems to come first in technical discussions and security seems to be the perennial afterthought. This can be considered reasonable given how we shop for things in general, namely finding the thing that meets our expectations and then ensure it has all the bells and whistles. The good news is that this seems to be changing bit by bit as our industry realizes that security is no longer a nice-to-have feature, but is actually a core requirement.

Last month we skipped the introduction to summarize some of the things we hope to bring to you in the coming year. This month we are circling back to our backgrounds in the hopes that this will help explain why we might be suited to fulfill the agenda hinted at last month.

We (Patrick and Bruce) are new to ISSJ. In a future article, you'll learn more about who we are and why we are here. In this issue, we thought we would take a minute to frame some of the discussions that will go on throughout the year.