VMware has acquired New Hampshire based virtualization consulting firm, Foedus. Does this help answer the question about whether or not you should train your existing staff or hire new employees with virtualization expertise to operate your virtual infrastructure? Or does it raise more questions? And how much is virtualization expertise really worth in the open market? It seems that even the undisputed heavyweig VMware has acquired New Hampshire based virtualization consulting firm, Foedus. Does this help answer the question about whether or not you should train your existing staff or hire new employees with virtualization expertise to operate your virtual infrastructure? Or does it raise more questions? And how much is virtualization expertise really worth in the open market?It seems that even the undisputed heavyweight of virtualization leaves its corporate walls once in a while in search of acquiring this type of talent. VMware announced that it has closed a deal to acquire the assets of the privately held virtualization consulting firm, Foedus. The deal, which closed earlier this month, has 30 Foedus employees moving over to the virtualization giant, and they are expected to help train IT services firms that resell VMware’s products and advise them on best practices. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. If you aren’t sure who Foedus is but you’ve been to VMworld – just think about the giant tiki hut, the mixed drinks and the Hawaiian print shirts (and I’ll leave it at that). If those things don’t ring a bell, chances are you probably never set foot in the exhibit hall.But just knowing that, you may still have no clue as to who or what Foedus is or why the company could demand any price tag from VMware. To me, this is further proof that virtualization expertise is hard to come by and in many cases perhaps easier to acquire than to train. In addition to the company’s resource pool of talent and virtualization best practices, Foedus also offered a Desktop Optimization service designed to assist in reducing application management costs by allowing accelerated application deployment and increased control of an organizations desktop environment. They also introduced something called GridTrak, a proprietary tool for tracking SoftGrid application sequencing activities and for package lifecycle. It will be interesting to see if VMware has any plans of continuing such technology. Software Development