"We've had relationships with these companies for a number of years, but we're trying to hone in and target the data centre environment. Citrix, VMware and Microsoft are alliance partners." Roy Illsley, principal analyst at Ovum, said Enterasys' datacentre offering could help businesses run their datacentres, particularly with regards to being able to easily move virtual machines around. But the analyst added that the portfolio was not unique in the market. "It's making the management of the datacentre easier. Is it unique? No," Illsley told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. The analyst likened Enterasys to Juniper, for two reasons: because they are both entering the datacentre market from a networking heritage and because both firms are building their infrastructure to support other vendors' kit. This affords enterprises less vendor lock-in than going with Cisco, he said.