June 16th, 2009
Is Vyatta now part of Microsoft keiretsu?
Maybe my recent trip to Japan is still in my brain, but reading about Citrix leading a new Vyatta funding round provokes the headline question.
A keiretsu, for those scoring at home, originally meant a conglomerate consisting of interlocking companies under central control.
But as I warned my Japanese friends during the recent trip, if we Americans like a word we’ll steal it. Then change it.
In America a keiretsu is more a cross between the Kevin Bacon game and Kremlinology. Market players infer relationships based on who has what link to whom and how close the link is to a dominant company.
Citrix, which also owns Xen, the virtualization company, has long-standing links with Microsoft such that open source advocates routinely think of it as being in Microsoft’s orbit. (The illustration above, from Bob Warfield’s Smoothspan blog, illustrates this keiretsu concept in terms of cloud computing.)
The Citrix-Vyatta link, discussed here by Dan Kusnetsky (who also has the good sense to partner with our own Paula Rooney) is a second-order link. That is, Microsoft links to Citrix links to Vyatta. (A litle like Bacon’s own relation to Hitler, as seen on The Daily Show.)
It’s a delicate dance, especially at times like this when growth capital is so scarce. Time will tell whether Vyatta tilts toward, say, Xen in helping craft customer solutions. Or whether it starts pushing Novell’s Suse Linux over, say, Red Hat. ‘
But people will be watching.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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