VMworld keynote big opportunity to address concerns about VMware
VMware’s new CEO Paul Maritz will outline the company’s strategy in a highly anticipated VMworld keynote
VMware has faced some rather public upheaval over the past few months: the departures of founders Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum, big drops in stock prices, and an embarrassing technical mistake that temporarily prevented customers from logging on to virtual servers.
But on Tuesday, Paul Maritz, newly appointed president and CEO, will have his biggest opportunity yet to address public concerns about VMware and provide a road map for the future of virtualization. He’ll be delivering a keynote in front of 14,000 attendees at VMworld in Las Vegas, and will then answer questions in a Q&A session.
“This is going to be his coming-out party, the first VMworld where Maritz will be taking center stage,” says Charles King of the Pund-IT analyst firm. “It’s critical for him to get out in front of the large customers and VMware partners and let them know the VMware ship is still on course, that they’ve still got a terrific product. It will be critical for him to outline what long-term strategy the company is following and what steps the company is taking to get there.”
Maritz will use his keynote to lay out VMware’s major areas of focus and describe where the company is going in coming years, says Raghu Raghuram, vice president of VMware products and solutions.
VMware will also make about 10 formal announcements at VMworld and describe the major products it plans to release in 2009. Virtualization has “barely scratched the surface of what’s possible,” Raghuram says.
Maritz, a former Microsoft executive, came on board in July after the EMC-owned VMware fired co-founder and CEO Diane Greene. Greene’s husband, VMware chief scientist Mendel Rosenblum, resigned from the company two months later.
King, who was surprised Rosenblum stayed as long as he did, says customers shouldn’t be concerned by changes at the top. Greene and Rosenblum led VMware from start-up to rock star status, but when a company becomes a powerhouse it faces a quite different set of challenges, he says.
“Executives leave companies on a very regular basis. It’s part of doing business frankly,” King says. “The dismissal of Diane Greene was a difficult thing, I think, for everybody involved. … [But] I think frankly Maritz is a great fit for the company right now.”
Maritz is an “excellent marketer” who had a lot to do with the success of Windows, says independent IT analyst Laura DiDio.
Maritz’s new battleground pits him against Microsoft and other budding virtualization vendors such as Citrix, Oracle, Virtual Iron and Sun. While its competitors typically offer cheaper prices, it’s generally agreed that VMware still has the most robust server virtualization technology.
“They have the advantage of starting out ahead [of competitors],” says VMware user Mitch Dysart, the IT director of operations and chief technology architect at Ohio State University. “I am very interested to see what they have in store for the future.”
King pinpointed VMware’s focus on high-availability technology to create more resilient IT infrastructures, and said he expects a lot more work on this front.
But customers likely have a long wish list of things they want to hear from Maritz, both in terms of new products and insight on the next steps for virtualization, not only for servers but for storage, desktops, applications and networks.
“Maritz is going to be focused on the future of virtualization – getting out of the data center to the desktop and beyond,” DiDio says. “You’re really talking about [computing in] the cloud.”
Dysart wants to see better tools for cloning virtual machines. He also suggests that VMware work on software that lets virtual machines span multiple physical servers. Essentially, he suggests aggregating several physical boxes into one virtual machine for high-performance applications – the opposite of typical virtualization, which carves up one physical box into multiple virtual machines.
Dysart also expressed concern about the pricing of applications that run on VMware servers. Software application vendors still don’t have a uniform method of assessing licensing fees for software that runs on virtual rather than physical machines. This isn’t the direct responsibility of VMware, but “they have a huge presence,” Dysart notes. “They might be able to come up with some sort of a template licensing agreement for the software publishers to follow.”
Disaster recovery is on the mind of Rick Scherer, who oversees an extensive VMware deployment at the San Diego Data Processing Corporation, a nonprofit set up by the San Diego municipal government to provide IT services. VMware offers a Site Recovery Manager technology, but Scherer says there’s room to have more automation of the virtual machine recovery process.
“We are planning the building of one of our disaster recovery sites, and that would definitely make that plan a lot easier,” he says.
Virtualization management will take center stage for much of VMworld, DiDio says. While virtualization solves many IT problems, it also creates some “very distinct challenges” around management and security, she says.
“One of the hard realities of virtualization when it comes to security is that the hypervisor doesn’t have a view into the underlying hardware or applications,” she says. “You need a lot of third-party tools.”
Reliability is also top-of-mind for some customers.
Maritz was forced to apologize in August after a bug in a software update prevented VMware users from logging on to virtual servers. The bug fooled the software into thinking customer product licenses had expired.
Maritz promised an internal review of VMware’s quality assurance processes.
The incident was “deeply embarrassing but not unusual in the IT world,” King says. VMware moved quickly to apologize and correct the problem and probably doesn’t have to do much more to reassure its customer base, he says. However, Raghuram says “we will be addressing any customers that are still concerned on a one-on-one basis. You will see some blogs from Paul Maritz down the road that explain what we have done.”
“Little bugs like this should have been caught,” says Scherer, who was not affected because he hadn’t updated to the new software. “It definitely hurts their integrity and the trust people have in the product. But I think they’ve proven themselves as a company. Their support is phenomenal. For the most part they’ve built a very stable and solid product.”
