Earlier this month, Virtual Iron announced the hiring of former Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst and consultant Tony Asaro as chief strategy officer. In this role, they expected Asaro to focus on business strategy, ecosystem development, evangelism and education of Virtual Iron to the market. It looks like Asaro is coming out of the gate full steam ahead with his first post on his new Virtual Discourse b Earlier this month, Virtual Iron announced the hiring of former Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst and consultant Tony Asaro as chief strategy officer. In this role, they expected Asaro to focus on business strategy, ecosystem development, evangelism and education of Virtual Iron to the market.It looks like Asaro is coming out of the gate full steam ahead with his first post on his new Virtual Discourse blog site. In it, he describes a virtualization market that is dominated by VMware to the point where it becomes a monopoly. And in this monopoly controlled virtualization space, where does Virtual Iron see itself playing?Virtual Iron is embracing the small to medium sized enterprise (SME) market, where the company says they have had most of their success. Asaro describes it: Where does Virtual Iron fit into this picture? Right now, we are the little guy in a land of giants. Virtual Iron has a really good product. We have thousands of production implementations (and rapidly growing) and a healthy and increasingly strong channel. However, in spite of this, we are inconsequential to the ecosystem I’ve been talking about. But guess what? It really doesn’t matter. Where we win – where we matter – is with small and medium enterprises (SME). They have no loyalty to VMware. They are looking for a server virtualization solution that has all of the advanced capabilities and features they need to protect and manage their environments; they want an easy to use solution; and it has to be cost effective so that it doesn’t consume the lion’s share of their IT budget. That is what we bring to the table and it is really a no-brainer for them once they get their hands on it. We also matter to the channel. Many of our channel partners feel that VMware is oversaturated. Since everyone is selling it, they can’t make any money. And their SME customers can’t afford VMware, so they are looking for an alternative. We are that alternative.VMware would argue that this isn’t the case. That VMware’s product is affordable by the SME market. In fact, an entire blogosphere of postings covered this argument from one vendor’s blog to the next.Price is but one area where the virtualization vendor ecosystem continues to go after VMware – hard. And without actually lowering prices, VMware is fighting back. Software Development