VMware Announces Cloud Computing Initiatives

At VMworld Europe 2009, VMware outlined a comprehensive strategy and technology roadmap the company said will help businesses achieve the benefits of cloud computing internally and bridge to external cloud resources through private clouds. This strategy aims for a more modern approach to delivering IT as a service, thus achieving maximum efficiency and flexibility for businesses.

According to VMware's president and CEO Paul Maritz, there are three key enabling components for building a private cloud:

VMware said it is committed to open interoperability between cloud services and plans to submit a draft of its vCloud API to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to help enable consistent mobility, provisioning, management, and service assurance of applications running in internal and external clouds.

Cloud computing has been the hot topic du jour for months now, but some definitions and descriptions of cloud computing happen to be, ironically enough, amorphously cloud-like. There's a simple enough reason for that. Vendors tend to define new efforts and markets according to their own strengths.

But virtually every cloud computing strategy emphasizes one technology -- virtualization -- over all others. There's a simple enough reason for that, too. Without virtualization, cloud computing would simply evaporate because at the center of every cloud is a highly flexible, highly integrated pool of virtualized IT assets and resources.

That fact puts VMware into an interesting position. Given the company's central role in virtualization, it makes perfect sense for VMware to enumerate how it and its technologies will help businesses adopt and adapt to cloud computing through the development of internal clouds, the secure access of IT resources in external clouds, and the creation of private clouds that securely blend internal and external cloud computing resources.

VMware's new VDC-OS and vCloud API are broad strokes in what should eventually become a highly detailed canvas. The VDC-OS plays to the company's traditional strong points and envisions what it will take to centrally manage largely or entirely virtualized data centers. The vCloud API aims to be the mechanism for seamlessly federating and running VMware applications anywhere the cloud touches -- internally, externally, or in combination.Is VMware's cloud initiative visionary? Absolutely. Is it achievable? Probably so. Will it be easy? Let me get back to you on that. On the downside, efforts like VDC-OS and vCloud tend to be highly complex and demanding, requiring equal parts of skill, daring, and tenacity to succeed. On the upside, VMware has successfully pursued similarly complex and demanding efforts in the past.

Apart from its inbuilt challenges, the tallest hurdle for VMware to tackle is likely to come from competitive partners who willingly resell and work with VMware solutions on one hand, but are also pressing forward with their own broad cloud computing initiatives and strategies on the other. The complicated but necessary lesson for VMware and those other players is to recognize when it makes sense to play together and alone in ways that minimize confusion and pain among potential customers. Learn that trick and the future possibilities of cloud computing will be sky high.

Charles King, President and Principal Analyst for research firm Pund-IT Inc. , focuses on business technology evolution and interpreting the effects these changes will have on vendors, their customers, and the greater IT marketplace.