Views From VMworld 2008

Every new CEO encounters significant challenges, but Paul Maritz's ascension at VMware was thornier than most, as it followed the very public sacking of company founder Diane Greene. Maritz's VMworld keynote was further complicated by the resignation the previous week of VMware co-founder (and Greene's husband) Mendel Rosenblum.

Maritz, who played a major role in Microsoft's successes in the 1980s and '90s, proved himself up to the task. After graciously acknowledging Greene and Rosenblum's foresight and contributions to VMwares virtualization product and market leadership, Maritz went on to outline how the company's new Virtual Data Center Operating System (VDC OS) strategy would play to next-generation demands for highly flexible and robust IT infrastructures.

The context Maritz provided highlighted a point that all too many IT vendors forget; that visionary strategies are built on the backs of reliable point products. It is also critical that a company's long-term plans fall logically in line with past accomplishments. For VMware, the logic of its "cloud" ambitions arises out of its historic focus on helping clients maximize their IT investments while minimizing complexity for end users. While the details of VMware's effort may change over time, its raison d'être makes sense.

VDC OS aims to leverage and extend VMware's deep virtualization expertise beyond servers to integrate and optimize end-to-end data center infrastructure processes. Is this reasonable? We believe so, though we also expect the company to encounter significant challenges along the way. Some of these will come from competitors including Microsoft and Citrix, which have made no bones about their virtualization market plans. But we also wonder how VMware's VDC OS ambitions will sit with companies that willingly rely on enterprise-class UNIX and mainframe solutions. Just how encompassing can an IT worldview be if it sets its sights on a single platform?

Overall, we believe that VMware's partners will play critical roles in driving the success of the VDC OS effort, a point Maritz made clear in his keynote. Along with the company's roster of well known x86 server buddies, the group signing on to support VMware's effort was a veritable who's who of storage, networking, and service provision vendors.Their active participation is an important point, particularly as it applies to an irony implicit in VMware's plans. For years, an essential benefit of virtualization has been its ability to help reduce the inherent complexity of scale-out distributed server environments -- what Maritz called draining server swamps. But while strategically integrated virtualization solutions could extend similar benefits to storage, networking, and service provisioning, it will require hugely complex data management and data center administration efforts to make the process effective.

No single vendor will ever own all these processes, but VMware's partner list suggests that others believe in the company's vision and are willing to perform some heavy lifting on its behalf. That may be because they buy into the technological worth of the VDC OS, vCloud, and vClient initiatives. But it could also be that they understand the potential value to themselves and their business customers that VMware's virtualized cloud strategy portends.

— Charles King, Pund-IT president and principal analyst, focuses on business technology evolution and interpreting the effects these changes will have on vendors, their customers, and the greater IT marketplace. Charles began working in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s writing on technical, business, and strategy issues, then became an IT industry analyst in 1998. Since founding Pund-IT in December 2004, Charles has published the Pund-IT Weekly Review, which contains this blog and additional industry analysis. King has also produced numerous client projects, and has been quoted in a wide variety of IT industry and media outlets.

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