Not too long ago that common wisdom in the channel was that Microsoft riding a wave of interest in a free implementation of a Hyper-V virtual machine would unseat VMware as the king of virtualization. But as the economy has slowed adoption of Windows Server 2008 R2, the momentum driving Hyper-V has slowed.

In addition, Microsoft has yet to deliver a meaningful framework for managing virtual machine software. In fact, virtualization adoption as a whole has stalled in large measure to the simple fact that many of the existing servers that can effectively run virtual machine software have already been turned into virtual servers, and the tools needed to really manage those environments have yet to be mastered by most customers.

Now Oracle, in the wake of its acquisition of Sun, is signaling its intention to compete across the board in the virtualization space against VMware. There no doubt that Oracle will have its hands full trying to unseat VMware. But from a technology perspective, Oracle is taking an applications focused approach to virtualization that wraps a solid portfolio of deployment and management tools around the OracleVM platform.

As the company gears up to release a beta version of OracleVM 3.0, Oracle is signaling that the entire virtualization space from desktop to server is a major strategic direction for the company. For solution providers in the channel, this may be the best of all possible news.

As long as only one company dominates this sector, there isn’t going to be much of an opportunity for providing management services across a range of heterogeneous virtual machine platforms. The channel needs to see Oracle, Microsoft, Citrix and a host of other companies succeed in this space to create demand of services that will be needed to manage a diverse virtualization ecosystem.

Without that diversity, the virtualization market will be dominated by one player. And while there’s nothing wrong with VMware per se, wherever there is diversity there’s more opportunity for the channel.