News from the front
Cloud remains the predominant marketing term in the IT industry. In one sense I like how it sparks innovation and new IT thinking but on the other hand it makes my stomach turn every time I hear it. I just completed a week in Las Vegas attending my 7th VMworld and most of what I saw was on par with my expectations. Here are a few notes of interest I walked away with:
- Microsoft produced a few chuckles with some competitive fun: https://www.vm-limited.com/
- VMware continues to innovate at a rapid pace–maybe too rapid. Specifically when I look at its core vSphere platform, I see some amazing forethought and impressive technological advances, but I’m not 100% convinced its customers are ready to adopt them at the pace with which they have embraced its core platform–where the primary focus is on consolidation and cost containment. I do like how VMware has cranked up the volume on disaster recovery and disaster avoidance. This is a perfect example of how it can advance its customer base and start to fire up the service provider/ hosting community. The IT vendor community should take note and start aligning its messaging with VMware while highlighting any unique advantages. Zerto, a newcomer to the industry, is a good example of this, and as a result, walked away with Best Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery product and Best of Show presented by searchservervirtualization.com.
- WOW! VMware, led by the showmanship of Vittorio Viarengo, did a fantastic job sharing its end-user computing strategy. It wasn’t that long ago that VMware had a product named VMware VDI and I stood scratching my head wondering where they were headed with it. This week I was impressed, as were the many attendees I spoke with. Centered on Horizon Application Manager, VMware is tuning in where I believe the biggest pain in IT lies–with consumerization leaving IT faced with the proliferation of endpoint devices and no clear strategy to embrace new endpoint devices and, equally important, securely deliver applications to them. VMware made some great VMware View product advancements as well as articulating a compelling vision for the future of application delivery and endpoint device adoption. Now it’s time to execute!
- Storage–remember back 5-6 years ago when storage was all the buzz and VMware was trying to rapidly build its alliance program. VMware’s focus on storage has significantly bumped up–both with its own innovation and with what I observed on the show floor. Watch out for companies like Coraid that are well aligned with the VMware freight train and set to disrupt the market , but you should speak with my ESG colleague Mark Peters who can provide better insight than I across the entire storage ecosystem and quiz him on some of the latest doings with VMware.
- I’m a strong believer that the IT consumption model is changing–not only with cloud computing, but in the way IT procures and operates IT infrastructure. A good example of this is the success a company like VCE is having in VDI environments, which was further validated with its VMware View announcement this week. Any IT department focused on overall economics driven by improving its operational model get the benefits of a turnkey solution. The ones still focused on spinning disks, CPU core count, memory banks, etc., will take some time to make the leap, but watch for it to happen driven by IT simplification, IT economics measured at the application level, and the trend to shift towards more IT automation and less bit-twiddling.
- Management–and I don’t mean data center orchestration and building service catalogues. The current footprint of server virtualization has been laid using back of the napkin economics. The next wave of success and economic gain is not nearly as cut and dried. IT will need visibility from the application to the data, intelligence that drives manual tasks to automates response, predictive modeling, and reporting driven by intelligent tools aimed at exponentially improving the economic benefits of server virtualization. VMware is of course very focused here, as are companies like VMturbo who took the time to run me through its solutions.
- Security–I’ll defer here to my ESG colleague Jon Oltsik who posted the following blog entry: vShield, Cloud Computing, and the Security Industry.
- Networking–VMware shared some progress with VXLAN that will be interesting to watch. See Jon Oltsik’s blog, VMware VXLAN: Cloud Network Segmentation Over Layer 2.5.
It’s very exciting to be part of a major IT industry event like VMworld and watch VMware continue to do an amazing job building a community of end-users that are driven to advance IT into uncharted waters. You can read Mark’s other blog entries at Liquefying IT.
