Citrix profits increased by 47% in the fourth quarter of 2009, driving profits for the year up 7% compared to 2008.

Citrix attributed its record profits to an increased interest in desktop virtualization and the launch of XenDesktop 4. But its quarterly revenue grew by only 8% compared to Q4 in 2008, and revenue from product licenses and license renewals grew 4% and 6%, respectively.

The really big growth came from technical services and online services, which saw revenues increase by 18% and 20%, respectively.

Citrix’s press release did not mention XenServer at all. Skeptics would point to that as just another indicator that Citrix is giving up on XenServer. But the company has said all along that, by making XenServer free and open source, one of the goals is to drive more services business. Judging by these financial results, that strategy is working.

Citrix’s results come just days after VMware reported that its fourth-quarter profits fell by 49% — although VMware earnings for the quarter did beat Wall Street expectations by more than $50 million.

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2009 was the year of Microsoft vs. VMware. Is 2010 shaping up to be the year of Oracle vs. VMware?

During yesterday’s five-hour Oracle-Sun press conference, Oracle’s chief corporate architect Edward Screven took aim at VMware: “VMware is integrated with nothing. It’s a point solution.”

Of course, that’s not entirely true. VMware integrates with lots of stuff, both hardware and software, but it’s usually other vendors making that other stuff. (The Cisco Unified Computing System is a prime example.) Judging by VMware’s longstanding dominance in the market, this is a strategy that has worked out pretty well for them.

Now that it has Sun’s virtualization and hardware assets, Oracle is taking a different approach: stressing the value of integrated management (with Oracle Enterprise Manager) and virtualization-specific hardware/software bundles, all from one vendor.

Alone, Oracle and Sun never had much success in virtualization. (When Screven touted Oracle VM as “the best virtualization solution for databases” yesterday, my colleague Bridget Botelho responded on Twitter: “Then why doesn’t anyone use it?”)

And they didn’t announce anything revolutionary yesterday that would immediately cause people to jump on the Oracle-Sun virtualization bandwagon. (Sounds like underwhelming press conferences was the theme of the day, eh, Steve Jobs?)

Clearly, Oracle needs to do more to become a major player. The whole trend of integrated hardware and software for virtualization is something the vendors are pushing; it’s not something a whole lot of customers want now.

Larry Ellison and his Oracle execs know they can’t take on VMware just by talking a good game. So they must have bigger plans in the works. Will they build Oracle VM up using the Virtual Iron technology they acquired last year? Or will they make an even bigger splash by acquiring Citrix?

VMware once enjoyed free reign of the market. Then along came Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world, which became a serious challenger in just a few short years. Now the third-biggest software company, Oracle, is making a similar move. Whatever happens, things are about to get very interesting.

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Last week’s announcement by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard that they had entered in to a $250 million partnership was light on specifics, but at least one IT manager has an opinion of how the two companies should focus their engineering efforts.

“My biggest thing is man, just get me off of two consoles,” said Matt Lavallee, director of technology at MLS Property Information Network, Inc. in Shrewsbury, Mass.

As it stands, Lavallee, who runs Microsoft Hyper-V on HP servers, relies on both HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) for information about the physical servers themselves, and Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) for OS- and application-level monitoring.

In his opinion, that’s one console too many. Take managing alerts. “We probably manage 600 alerts in Operations Manager, and another 50 or 60 in SIM. It’d be great to manage alerts in one place, especially since so many of them are related,” he said.

Not having a single pane of glass is especially annoying in a virtual environment, where “physical doesn’t really matter anymore, even though at some level it still does,” Lavallee said. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could look at both layers together?”

Of the two consoles, Lavallee prefers HP SIM because it is cross-platform and Web-based. At the same time, there are many more plug-ins from third-party application vendors for Operations Manager. Thus, Lavallee’s idea is for engineers to take “the pipeline of data from Ops Manager and send it through to [the SIM] pane of glass.”

Lavallee puts the SIM/SCOM integration “on the better side of probable,” hopefully sooner rather than later. “If we don’t start to see things in the next six months, people like me are going to start calling it vaporware.”

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Xen.org posted the Xen 4.0 Release Candidate this week, and the new hypervisor code should be finalized by the end of next month.

Xen 4.0 will feature fault tolerance and the Open Virtual Switch, among other new features. Open source virtualization expert Sander van Vugt said the Open Virtual Switch “will take networking in Xen to the next level.”

“I’m convinced that this release is going to be huge,” he wrote in an email.

The new release comes at a crucial point for Xen. Citrix, the company most closely associated with Xen, faces constant questions about its commitment to XenServer and the server virtualization market as a whole.

Meanwhile, as virtualization.info’s Alessandro Perilli points out, Oracle is looking to become a bigger player in virtualization. Its Oracle VM is also Xen-based, so Xen 4.0 could help its charge into the market. (But then again, so could the rumored Oracle-Citrix acquisition.)

Xen also has an emerging open source challenger on its in hands in KVM, which is built into the Linux kernel. Although van Vugt took the side of KVM in our recent Xen vs. KVM debate, he still predicts good things for the future of Xen.

“Currently, VMware clearly is the more complete virtualization solution,” he wrote in his email. “Releasing the Xen 4 hypervisor will put Xen completely back in the picture, not only for Citrix, but for all other players in the Xen area as well.”

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