VMware reported third-quarter results on Oct. 21 that said it grew 14% over its third quarter last year. That sounds about right for a corporation stressed from Microsoft’s free Hyper-V and open source code on one side, and Amazon Web Services and other cloud suppliers at the other.

It’s called the commoditization of the virtualization market; everyone’s heard about it. And i am here to inform you, it is not happening, in any case not within the way that Wall Street analysts assume it’s miles. It’s coming, as surely because the next ice age, but VMware keeps putting new management products on top of the info center’s virtualized environment. It’s started reaching out to cope other sorts of virtual machines. In various ways it stays three steps sooner than commoditization’s noose.

How can that be? Don’t market survey figures show Microsoft’s Hyper-V gaining faster that can be purchased and pushing out VMware’s ESX Server? Yes, often times, but not up to the commoditization theory would suggest. Hyper-V supplies solid virtualization, and it’s being implemented in remote offices, business units and divisions that do not need your entire bells and whistles of a VMware vSphere environment. So market research from various sources shows Hyper-V growing faster than ESX Server.

But virtualization is greater than the adoption of a hypervisor at this point. Its devotees have moved from server consolidation to classy virtualization, a type of pre-cloud environment where they want to administer servers, storage and networking all as flexible, pooled resources. They need to go virtual machines around as they struggle to juggle host workloads, shut down the electricity consumption by underutilized servers and build in a disaster-recovery failover plan.

[ VMware execs explain why overlaying a physical network with a virtual network is sensible. See VMware Execs Talk Virtualized Networks. ]

Much of this is often done by those skilled at using Windows Server and Microsoft’s System Center with its Virtual Machine Manager component. But Microsoft has a great number of irons within the fire because it tries to restore its prospects as a shopper software company. Windows Server has a remarkable presence within the data center, frequently constituting half or two-thirds of the servers there, but VMware is generally the corporate that manages those Windows Servers which are virtualized.

VMware popularized the concept that of the software-defined data center, and often seems like it is the only firm that may envision the way it could be built (with its management suite inside the driver’s seat). Nevertheless, hypervisor market-share numbers disguise the indisputable fact that the cash is inside the management. And VMware is relentlessly considering management. Think vCenter Operations Management or vCenter Log Insight.

And that’s the reason why VMware’s revenue, minus the expenses of spinning out Pivotal, grew at a pace in Q3 more like 19% in than the reported 14%. That’s still off its highs in 2010 and 2011. But VMware is a miles larger company than it was. Nineteen percent growth of what’s more likely to be a $5 billion company in 2013 leaves it with an R&D budget in a position to sustaining its leadership position, or no less than continuing its output of latest management products. It’s that concentrate on that its competitors must shoot for. It is a moving target. And it’s hard to look a Microsoft, preoccupied with producing a tablet to compete with the iPad, catching up.

On the Cloud Connect show in Chicago, Mathew Lodge, VMware’s VP of cloud services, was hit with an issue on how VMware was getting painted right into a corner by Hyper-V, open source Xen and KVM.

“This complete thing about commoditization is overdone,” he responded. VMware is giving businesses more flexible control over their data centers, and during it, they are able to marshal resources more quickly for the moves they need to make.

“We’re turning the software infrastructure into the software-defined data center. Software is the best way that individuals have become new products to the market more quickly,” he said.

That’s a simplification, but it’s person who keeps plenty of VMware customers hanging around to determine the way it pans out.

Battle lines are forming behind hardware-centric and virtual approaches to software-defined networking. We size up strengths and weaknesses. Also within the SDN Skirmish issue of InformationWeek: Anonymity has a task in business communities. (Free registration required.)