Today, however, as has happened in so many areas of society and business, technology and IT have become democratized. Since the introduction of the Internet browser and then the rapid growth of social media, a new breed of tech-savvy worker has emerged. The end of the 9-5 workday has led to employees working around the clock and on the move. To make their lives easier, end users have blurred the distinction between work tools and personal tools, using personal smartphones and tablets on the job.

The Consumerization of IT

In the age of postconsumerization, individuals are making their own choices as to which business applications to use. A perfect example of this trend is the use of email in business. If email is not fully supported across devices by the internal IT department, then individuals will find ways to access work email on personal devices. The consumerization of IT (CoIT) revolution began when consumer brands such as Apple developed products that were easy to use, making purchasers’ business and personal lives more productive. True, Microsoft still dominates the overall enterprise IT pie and is often the primary option when it comes to email and desktop operating systems. However, Apple has nabbed a dominant share of the tablet market and is increasingly growing its share of the smartphone market. In short, there is no longer one principal technology vendor across the board.

End users today want tools that enhance their experience. If workers are not comfortable with the technology approved by IT, they can easily find many different options online for the devices already available to them. So the time has come for IT to make a decision. Do I fight the battle against personal products? Or do I embrace what people are already using and become their IT champion? Now, where consumerization has raised a number of IT security and compliance issues that are of great concern to IT, new tools that are both easy to use and “enterprise ready” are spreading like wildfire.

Beyond the CoIT Paradigm

At YouSendIt, we go beyond the CoIT paradigm: We develop our business-content collaboration tools with a laser focus on making the end-user experience easy, meeting the demands of where and how people work. Workers are collaborating all the time and they are often away from the office, so in response we developed a user-friendly interface that integrates seamlessly across mobile devices. However, we also give IT administrators the features they need to maintain security and compliance, thus satisfying both parties.

The CoIT trend has started and will continue to grow, giving IT managers a chance to be catalysts for change. The monopoly of enterprise products is dying and now there are a myriad of players in every facet of enterprise IT. A new kind of IT champion is emerging; one who does not force technology on end users, but who listens to them and selects solutions that meet the dual needs of the enterprise and end-user. Technology companies that develop products that allow IT to be the champion for their workforce will grow side by side with their customers.

Editor’s note: this is an initial guest post from Brian Curry.  See bio below:

Brian Curry, Chief Product Officer

Brian Curry is responsible for new market penetration, key partnership development, and product strategy at YouSendIt.

Brian brings 15 years of experience to the position and most recently was vice president of corporate partnerships at Yahoo!, where he oversaw the business unit that operates Tier 1 partnerships. While at Yahoo!, Curry managed partnerships with Comcast, EBay, Walmart, Turner Broadcasting and Adobe among others.

Prior to his tenure at Yahoo!, Brian was a vice president of AOL’s Premium and Subscription Services unit, where he was responsible for AOL businesses involving licensed access to the AOL network, integration of AOL services in third-party products, and development of subscription services.

He holds both Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Design and Technology from the University of Illinois.

Embracing Change to Become the IT Champion is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Following the implosion of Cirtas in April of last year, cloud gateway vendors have basically positioned themselves as “on ramps” from a customer data center to the actual cloud providers like Amazon, Azure, Nirvanix and Rackspace. With Amazon now offering its own cloud gateway, this calls into question the need for the middlemen who have been pushing their wares as a means of getting access to the Amazon cloud.

By cutting out the middlemen, Amazon could single handedly accelerate the demise of the standalone cloud gateway market. Sure, today the standalone vendors will cry out in protest that they offer “advanced” features that Amazon doesn’t have yet and that Amazon is still in beta mode—but the looming threat is irreversible: Amazon now has a platform that it can build additional functionality on to—and it will—rapidly

While they may have snapshots, encryption and cached volumes today, look for Amazon to add incremental functionality like data deduplication, file locking, and multi-site file sharing in the coming months.

For cloud gateway startups that have made broad public claims about their products’ ability to give customers superior access to AWS, today’s news doesn’t exactly fortify their business strategies. After all, Amazon can make their gateway work better with their own cloud than anyone else can—they do own it from soup to nuts, you know.

What does this mean for startups like Ctera, Nasuni, Panzura, TwinStrata, StorSimple and Riverbed’s Whitewater group?

VCs who invested in standalone cloud gateway vendors should definitely be concerned right about now.

Amazon Cuts Out the Middleman: Launches its Own Cloud Storage Gateway is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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That changed last weekend, when over the Thanksgiving holiday, it seemed just about everyone suddenly became an expert on semantic analysis, artificial intelligence, and exactly what was going on in the virtual brain of one AI in particular: Apple’s Siri.

Even SiliconANGLE’s own Alex Williams posted a quick hit to his ServicesANGLE column, showing the widely viewed video comparison of Apple’s Siri versus Microsoft’s TellMe.

I spoke with many friends about the coverage, and one prominent pundit known for his Apple fandom told me privately that he found the comparison to be very inaccurate.

“Cartwright’s test was very one-sided (and I’m a Siri fan),” he told me. “For example he didn’t show that TellMe can launch any app on the phone, Siri cannot.”

The way TellMe structures it’s verbal menus is fundamentally different from Apple (and, frankly, serves a quite different purpose). Siri was meant to be a close approximation of a virtual assistant, and as such, has what’s called a “flat grammar” menu system.

TellMe, on the other hand, isn’t always a flat-grammar system (depending on the implementation, which is much different on, say, the TV than it is on the PC or the phone). It also more closely represents a desktop paradigm translated to an auditory realm than a voice-first driven system.

For instance, with TellMe, a query on TellMe sounds like “Bing: Dallas Italian Restaurants,” if you’re looking for a place to eat in town. In Siri, it would sound more like “I’m hungry for Italian.”

Nuances of interface aside, I had to wonder whether or not the general tech punditry hadn’t been the victim of an epic head fake.

Apple’s Siri versus Ford’s Sync

I started thinking about Ford Sync being a more valid comparison point to the Siri product than TellMe shortly after I viewed the video and started polling for the best person to talk to at Ford about the angle, but before I got very far with that, I learned that Ford Motor Company CTO Paul Mascarenas, serendipitous enough, would be dropping by the SiliconANGLE Dallas office to meet with Cali Lewis and the Livid Lobster team.

He was gracious enough to take some time out of his schedule to sit with me and discuss the angle I had come up with: that it was more of a comparable product to Siri than perhaps Microsoft’s TellMe product.

There are a number of surface similarities he and I discussed. Siri and Sync both use Nuance as for the voice recognition end of the product. Both Siri and Sync use natural language processing (otherwise known as semantic processing) techniques to derive the users’ intents. Both, as I mentioned before, use a “flat grammar” system, rather than a hierarchical system. Siri and Sync contain a comparable number of commands; the permutations and combinations can produce a nigh-infinite number of commands, and Sync boasts 10,000 commands after the “Gen 2″ release.

Beyond the surface similarities, the two systems diverge a bit. As with anything concerning artificial intelligence, context is everything, and while Siri may be used in a car (or at the office, or in the restroom, or anywhere else), Sync must be used in the car. This allows Sync’s developers to be more focused on the range of commands and utility of the product than Siri’s developers, and perhaps deliver a more polished user experience. In other words, since Sync is geared towards a driver-centric experience, limiting the range of utility to driver-focused queries rather than the limitless queries faced by TellMe and Siri allows them to excel at what they attempt.

Not sure you agree with that sentiment? For proof, you need to look no further than the hub-bub generated by last week’s discovery that Siri had a hard time finding abortion clinics (which, as it turned out, wasn’t because of inherent sexism built into the AI, but because most abortion clinics prefer to go by the more politically correct moniker “family planning clinics”).

BeyondAI: What the Connect Car Means for Mechanical Engineering

In the time we had to speak, Paul and I moved on from the topic of AI into the further reaching implications of what the Sync innovations mean for the future of automotive engineering.

“It’s an shift in thinking for us,” said Mascarenas. “Our customers are used to us shipping a vehicle that’s perfect as soon as it comes out, and will last for 100,000 miles and ten years.”

The shift now, of course, being that Ford is shifting to the mode of development more familiar to us in the tech industry of shipping and iterating. It’s a bit reminiscent of an anecdote (often falsely attributed as direct confrontation between the CEOs of GM and Microsoft) that first surfaced for me in the very early days of the web:

There’s word in business circles that the computer industry likes to measure itself against the Big Three auto-makers. The comparison goes this way: If automotive technology had kept pace with Silicon Valley, motorists could buy a V-32 engine that goes 10,000 m.p.h. or a 30-pound car that gets 1,000 miles to the gallon — either one at a sticker price of less than $ 50.Detroit’s response: “OK. But who would want a car that crashes twice a day?”

Obviously, Ford intends to avoid living up to the “crash early and often” issues that early versions of GUI operating systems saw, but it does open up a world of new possibilities.

Perhaps the most interesting illustration of what the future may bring came when I described to Mascarenas the type of technology coverage we engage in at SiliconANGLE, where I mentioned we attended trade shows like SAPphire and Oracle Open World as well as Hadoop World and Strata.

I knew those weren’t conferences exactly in their wheelhouses, but I encouraged him to drop by our broadcast booth should he be in attendance at one of those shows.

“Those aren’t in our wheelhouse yet, but they very soon will be,” Mascarenas told me. “One of the more interesting possibilities of having an always on connection in our vehicles is the prospect of opt-in data collection. Sure, there are diagnostic and early problem detection possibilities that happen when you look at the data in aggregate, but there’s also an opportunity for us to create a more personal connection between drivers and their vehicles.”

He envisioned a future where the technology in the vehicle helps to create an almost palpable relationship between the car and driver.

“The technology story on the Evos [Ford's concept car debuted at IFA this year] is really all about a car that’s connected to the cloud,” said Mascarenas. “By connecting the car to the cloud we can use all kinds of data that to make a car that really adapts to your personal lifestyle. This includes data ranging from where you like to drive to what your driving style is, all the way down to your musical preferences and situation awareness of traffic and environment.”

In essence, what Mascarenas described to me was the contextual equivalent to what Siri does, but the difference being the function that same data served. Siri serves as a personal assistant, whereas the data collected from many of the same data sources serves to create a more comfortable and personal driving experience, and communicating the information non-verbally.

Of course, most of this new-fangled technology is available only in the Evos concept car, but Cali Lewis reported from IFA this year that some of this technology will be implemented in production vehicles as soon as January 2012.

.

Does This Mean Ford’s Going After Apple?

I’d doubt it seriously, though if were cut of the same jib as some of my peers in the blogosphere, I might set this up as “Ford’s gunning for Apple” for the extra pageviews. The truth is that Ford seems to have some very prescient technologists in their employ who spotted the trend of “Cloud Convergence” far earlier than any of their competitors. Simply because Ford and Apple are the only two organizations trying to create consumer facing machine intelligence in their respective products.

Mascarenas did tell me though that competing feature for feature with Siri or any other smartphone entrant isn’t in the cards.

“It’s a safety issue,” he told me. “When you’re driving, often with other passengers and a myriad of other distractions, we must keep interactions with our software as safety oriented and transparent as possible.”

Will Ford be the last entrant in this market? I think not. Certainly Microsoft will evolve TellMe to the point where it may have an identifiable personality trait, but I don’t expect to see it on the phone. The place where TellMe is most used is on the XBox Kinect, a market that is certain to only solidify in the coming weeks and months as the new Metro interface rolls out with live TV built in; a market that Apple can’t begin to hope to put a dent in.

Siri’s Closest Competition May Come from Detroit, Not Redmond is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Subsequent to that bubble bursting, enterprise tech has been a mixed bag with stalwarts such as Microsoft, Intel and Cisco trading in a disappointing range for investors. Consider that Intel and Microsoft are trading at roughly 80% of their respective values relative to ten years ago while Cisco is down around 10% in that timeframe. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq composite is up more than 30% in that same period with Oracle up more than 100% and EMC up around 40%.

Cisco went on an enormous buying spree in the mid-2000’s, trying to diversify into video and consumer markets to expand its total available market (TAM) and accelerate growth. The firm picked up Linksys for $500M and then followed that up with a giant $7B acquisition of Scientific Atlanta, a consumer video and data services company. Then there was Webex for $3.2B, which is driving the company’s collaboration business. In 2009, Cisco bought Pure Digital for nearly $600M. In a sign the company got too far out over its skis, earlier this year it killed the Flip camera business enabled by the Pure Digital acquisition.

Cisco was used to 40% growth rates in the 90’s and the acquisition strategy was designed to keep the company growing at a 15% clip. Despite the fact that some of these acquisitions (e.g. Webex) are now $1B+ businesses, major parts of Cisco’s diversification strategy failed, particularly in the consumer video space. As such, CEO John Chambers was forced to cut back and re-focus on its current main businesses including switching and data center products, collaboration, video and services.

I’ve been critical of Cisco in the past (as has many), but they have been responding with product upgrades and reorganizations. Juniper has had an opportunity to pull close to Cisco but has been squandering that chance. If Juniper’s software approach and mobile pans out maybe they might have a chance. Now it’s clear that the the negative sentiment has bottomed and Cisco is poised to rebound. The changes in the converged networking market are clearly lining up in favor of Cisco and HP.

What’s impressive is the Cisco turnaround. Cisco has moved from their “GE-like” organization structure to more decentralized decision making. This is helping them get back on track. The company has begun to execute on CEO John Chambers’ three-year plan. In its most recent quarter, Cisco posted record revenues, had double-digit product growth and grew gross margins in a very competitive pricing environment. Cisco has a very strong balance sheet and extremely good relationships with the channel. The heart of Cisco’s business is core switching and it’s from this point of strength where the company is mounting a counter attack to companies such as HP and Huawei.

Cisco is a leader and a giant player and in that sense it views the market through big picture trends. The data center is evolving from physical hardware to virtualized systems to cloud and IT-as-a-Service. To that end the company made a major pivot in 2009 diving into the server business and severing tight relationships with HP, IBM and Dell, forcing those three to make networking acquisitions to counter Cisco’s move.

Here’s what was going on there. Applications drive hardware sales. An application head decides to buy, say, Microsoft Exchange and that sets off a chain reaction of infrastructure capital expenditures for servers, which drags storage and networking along with it. Cisco for years had very tight relationships with server vendors and their joint channels of distribution. Cisco saw the chance to make a channel play and capture more value by bundling servers and networking into a single package (Cisco UCS which includes Intel blade servers). That also set up a virtualization and cloud play through a partnership with VMware (and EMC) called VCE, which bundles VMware, networking and storage together in a package. Think of it as cloud-in-a-box.

By targeting a servers and networking as a single block of infrastructure Cisco is now selling an attractive package to the channel, doing a reach around on HP, IBM and Dell. Its server business is 100% focused on x/86 blades, which is the highest growth market. Cisco and HP have been at war about server market shares but the bottom line is in two years Cisco has captured 10% of the worldwide x/86 blade market and is now in a dead heat with IBM in the U.S. for market share in this segment. While still behind HP in servers, Cisco is redefining the category by bundling in networking. This forced HP to purchase 3Com in late 2009. Nonetheless, it’s driving growth and margin expansion for Cisco’s core data center business.

Here are John Chambers’ comments regarding Cisco’s Data Center line of business from Cisco’s most recent financial conference call (Fiscal Q1):

Results in this area have been particularly outstanding, given that we are taking on the big competitors in the data center. As we focus on this market transition with the convergence of server, processing capabilities, networking and storage into the cloud, the UCS in the data center grew year-over-year at 122% in terms of orders and 116% in terms of revenues, and is now at a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate.

Even though the Nexus 2000 and 5000 are included in our switching product summary, not the data center, they are obviously tied very tightly to the UCS. Again, you saw the Nexus 2000 through the 5000 combination orders growth of approximately 120%, and revenue growth of approximately 80%. These 2 product lines together now have an annualized run rate of approximately $1 billion.

We are focusing all aspects of Cisco on gross margins. With our aggressive focus, you saw the UCS and Nexus 2000 through 5000 combined margin increase in Q1 by 3 points from Q4. We added 1,572 new UCS customers in Q1, bringing the total to 8,983.

The basic premise for Cisco fundamental detractors in 2010 and 2011 was that Juniper, HP, and Huawei would take share from Cisco and eat into the company’s margins. It appeared this was happening based on financial results over that time period. However Cisco’s investments in UCS, its strong channel and renewed focus on gross margin improvement seem to be paying off. While one good quarter does not make a turnaround it appears that Cisco is starting to figure out how to deal with the threat from lower priced competitors. At the heart of this strategy is UCS and Cisco’s Nexus business within the data center line of business at the company. It is the linchpin of Cisco and with a $1B run rate and a 100%+ growth rate it appears that the company is poised for a rebound.

Cisco is back on track and clearly not going to yield any ground. Can they continue that trend. We’ll be watching.

Cisco: Undervalued and on the Move Again on the Strength of the Core Data Center Business is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Google Atmosphere event at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California is the company’s big enterprise CIO event. This is the event where Google parades out their top executives and promotes that they indeed know what they are talking about in the enterprise.

Google is a growing enterprise vendor and compared to the likes of IBM, EMC, and HP they are still in kindergarten. That being said Google is making big strides specifically the opportunity with the cloud and mobile. Google has all the elements to compete on value with services.

Google hitting all the “table stakes” marks on enterprise with their 99.9% uptime messaging plus their customer satisfaction ratings are increasing. Both metrics are critical for to compete in the enterprise. One glaring hole in the program is the absence of big data. Google is one of the shinning examples of a company that is a “big data” company. Real time analytics is a big mega trend and in big time demand from enteprises. Last week at Hadoop World we saw the big push of big data going mainstream.

Google Positioned Well – Very Good Management Team

+Dave Girouard and +Bradley Horowitz both used to work together and watching them sit next to each other yesterday reminded me on how young Google is in the enterprise relative to the likes of HP, IBM, and EMC etc.. Dave and Bradley are smart and young and make up a great team. In addition, Google has added a slew of other smart people from across the company including newly hired social media and enterprise guru Louis Gray to drive Google +.

What was refreshing was the coolness of Google. CIOs that were in attendance were visibly excited by the Google message. When I got home it hit me. Google is cool because they are a tech powerhouse at least on the consumer side. Combine their technical chops with a very strong brand, the Google message is translating to large enterprise buyers not just small medium sized business and education buyers.

Case in point on the Google coolness. CIOs were taking turns getting photos on the street view bike. It was like watching kids at the boardwalk – pure fascination. Oh yeah, I’m writing this post on Google + on my new Chromebook that they gave away for free. Turned it on with no setup it’s up and running. That’s cool as far as I’m concerned. Disclosure: this is a evaluation unit

Although Google’s messaging is not as advanced as the big boys their position is solid as a new player on the enterprise block. Putting it all together has been Google strategy for this year’s atmosphere and it is about collaboration and video. The keys for Google enterprise has been a series of product upgrades and launch of Google +. I expect Google + to be a big part of the enterprise strategy anchoring the “Cloud Mobile Social” direction.

While the mainstream press talks about Google + as a Facebook wantabee, Google is rolling it out hard to all consumers – including business and education. Forget Facebook Salesforce.com is scared out of their minds.

Google + is a Salesforce.com killer.

Overall quite impressive and it will be intereseting to see if +Amit Singh has what it takes to lead Google Enterprise. I like the Girouard Horowitz combo.

Good luck Google we’ll cover all the angles.

Thoughts On Google Atmosphere – CIO ANGLE – SalesForce.com Should Be Scared Not Facebook is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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The reason I bring this up is quite often I hear discussions that are centered around the products (or services) providing various benefits, return on investment or cost saving opportunities.

Very little discussions are heard around whats being done or enabled by vendors and service providers, or what is being adopted by customers to tie in people, process and policy convergence.

Put another way, the discussions focus around the new technology or service while forgetting or assuming that the people, process and policies will naturally fall into place.

Will customer policies, process or procedures along with internal organizational (e.g. politics) issues with how people leverage those converged products also evolve?

I assert that while there are benefits that can be obtained from leveraging new enabling technologies (hardware, software, networks, services) their full potential will not be realized until policies, process, people skill sets and even more important, organizational or intradepartmental turf wars and boundaries are also addressed.

 This does not mean consolidating different groups, rather it can mean thawing out relations between groups if there are challenges, establishing an abstraction or virtual layer, a virtual team to cut across different technology domains combing various skill sets, new best practices, policies and procedures in order to streamline management of physical and virtual resources.

Chuck Hollis (aka twitter @ChuckHollis) of EMC has an interesting blog post (here) that ties in the themes of different IT groups working or not having situational awareness that is worth a read. You can also read this Industry Trends and Perspective solution brief that I did earlier this year on the topic of Removing Organizational Barriers for Leveraging Technology Convergence.

Here are some additional related posts:

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• Industry adoption vs. industry deployment, is there a difference?
• The new Green IT: Efficient, Effective, Smart and Productive
• Who is responsible for vendor lock in?
• What do VARs and Clouds have in common

What is your organization doing (or have done) to enable convergence factoring in people, processes, policies and products or is it a non issue for you?

[Cross-posted at StorageIO Blog]

Convergence: People, Processes, Polices and Products is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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The new approach, which involves creating storage “containers” holding the data, metadata, and policy data, has some good ideas, Floyer says, but its implementation could stifle innovation. VMware has announced that it will work with Dell, EMC, Hitachi, IBM, and NetApp, but will exclude the more innovative storage startups and particularly the flash storage companies, to develop the new approach.

“Wikibon believes this business model is driven by EMC to slow down storage innovation and preserve it’s current products for as long as possible,” Floyer writes. He says that shareholders and customers should tell VMware that they expect it to use the best storage technology and ideas in its architecture rather than “baking in” old technologies.

VMware Storage Direction May Put Parent EMC’s Needs Before Users, Says Wikibon CTO is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Part 1 (full video below) was mostly an observation of some of the biggest drives pushing this trend forward today.  Network convergence is about bringing down costs by consolidating things, but on a broader level, it helps disrupting the rest of the infrastructure in the process.  Stu Miniman, a senior analyst at Wikibon and panel moderator, noted: “It’s about simplifying environments, which really is one of the foundational technologies to help enable cloud technologies.”

10GbE Ethernet is one of those drivers, and the panel predicted that two or three players will eventually emerge to claim the dominant stake of this market. Server vendors also play a big role in this industry-wide push.

An interesting update in the converged network is the announcement of Cisco’s Virtual Extensible LAN, touted as the next gen tunneling protocol.  It’s designed to increase the salability of virtualization in networking beyond what regular VLAN offers, and also lets users provision virtual networks. This evolution follows the processor and storage segments (see Part 2 here).

Abner Germanow of Juniper Networks said in Part 3 that the reason behind this shift is demand from the customer end.  Necessity derived from exploding amounts of data and a growing number of end points means customers are moving away from the server to a client traffic model, and are starting to put an emphasis on agility, rather than just cost efficiency.

During Part 4, the emphasis was that costs efficiency is still a very big factor. Enterprises are turning to converged networking because it reduces infrastructure overheads as well as the amount of manpower they need to invest. They are also increasing VM density and generating larger and larger amounts of big data, which requires 10GbE Ethernet.

Agility, Not Just Cost, Grows Demand for Converged Networks is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Starting with the newest editor on staff, the wrap up discussion turns to Williams to see his thoughts as a first time attendee to VMworld.  And for him, it was one of the most interesting tech events he’s been to.  “Virtualization is having this vaporizing effect,” Williams enthuses.

For Furrier, the big theme he picked up on was disruption.  “The mega-trend we’re seeing with cloud, social and mobile is about hardware — all the hardware that powers the network and storage is being forced down and commoditized,” he says.  “Take it up a notch and you’re talking about the application market for the enterprise and the consumer.  Finally, there’s the user.  The user experience is tying it all together.  In each of these theaters and at the center is startups, innovation.  It’s causing the big guys to rethink how they sell and do services.”

What impressed Vellante is the vision of the software mainframe.  It’s a concept that may bore a lot of people, but it’s one VMware is re-working in order to better support growing demand around applications and their integration.  “VMware has executed on that vision extremely well,” Vellante points out.

“Last year they rolled out the concept and this year is about implemenation,” Furrier adds.  “Ultimately what I heard is the disruption of the ecosystem, validated by all this buzz.  Their ecosystem is growing.  As VMware starts to mature their ecosystem, next year we’re going to see power points move to case studies.  It’s still early, and people are making changes.”


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Speaking to that maturing ecosystem, Williams notes some things he picked up on roving the show floor.  “You see a lot of collaboration going on out there.  The people I listen to and follow–where do they show up?  They were here.  Why?  Because there’s interesting developments in the space.  We’re seeing this battle go up the stack.  And we look at what’s happening with VMware and Salesforce–they’re going head to head.”

Certainly, as VMware builds on its initial products and gains more partners within its ecosystem, it steps on some toes spanning other areas of the broader cloud industry.  During one of Williams’ panels, the matter of VMware competing with Salesforce and Microsoft was brought p, as SaaS becomes a more prevelant aspect of integrated cloud services for the enterprise.

And as VMware looks to expand its ecosystem, there are a few areas that demand attention.  With VMware working its way into the majority of servers across the industry, they’re really sitting in the driver’s seat, which brings up the issue of lock in.  Vellante notes that he’s already hearing some grumbling about pricing and end user licensing, a concern that was raised over the summer with the launch of vSphere 5.  VMware has a fine line to walk, and the build out of their platform will only continue to present a challenge for VMware’s business model moving forward.

The other area VMware will need to pay attention to is security.  Being so prominant in this space, VMware will need to be a leader, and build security into its products.  This means moving past compliance, and finding real solutions.

So what’s the outlook for VMware moving forward?  “Performance and availability, and mobility,” says Vellante.  “What a difference between last year and this year with VDI do-over.  Security is the big area for me.  The ecosystem is over-stating capabilities and VMware has a lot more work to do.  This is VMware’s problem and they need to solve this.  Yes, they need help from the ecosystem, but they need to build it into their architecture.”

Williams looks at VMware from a business perspective, noting the company’s goals hitting $10 billion in revenue.  “They want to virtualize everything,” he says.  “They have to start thinking about, ‘what does virtualization enable?’  It’s an enabler to join lots of things.  The post-PC era ties into this.  End user computing is more critical.  Mobile virtualization is a big topic and you’ll see lots of competition in this space.  Citrix and Microsoft are competing here.”

Furrier follows up Williams’ statement by emphasizing the consumer experience.  “We’re going to see a massive competitive landscape for VMware integration and differentiation,”  he says.  “With the emphasis on delivering solutions, the demand for cloud is so massive, and it will keep vendors in check to deliver real solutions.”  Let the shake-out begin.

The Disruptive Nature of VMware’s Ecosystem: VMworld 2011 Wrap Session is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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“VMware is changing beyond just the virtualization layer, growing into layers above that, as we saw with the acquisition of Zimbra and Springsource,” Awadallah begins.  “Regardless, storage is very important at both layers.  Traditionally I’ve seen VMware focused on central storage, and I predict over the next few years that will change, with more storage moving onto servers themselves.”

In fact, storage would become an important aspect of the panel discussion, as well as VMware’s goals around expanding the role of virtualized environments.  And there’s a few ways VMware is going about this implementation, from product delivery to commercialization of things like the open source cloud for the enterprise.  VMware’s still relatively early in its commercialized open source cloud offering, but it’s helping to drive the community, McDougall points out.

“Looking at the core values, VMware is growing well,”  McDougall says.  “People want big data resources, so some core features into management and other functionalities allow people to leverage that deeper at the platform level.  It’s better able to be exploited.”

A key mechanism in this commercialization process is Hadoop, and it’s an open source software program that’s being utilized by both Cloudera and VMware for enterprise solutions.  So what is it that the enterprise is looking for right now?  Do they even know what it is they need from this still fresh offering?

“They’re about big data in many ways,” Awadallah points out.  “Having a cloud that’s scalable and can do your bidding–that’s exactly what Hadoop offers.  The first change an organization is looking to do is behavioral.  They want to be more agile and adaptive, and not be locked in to a given language or schema.  Hadoop gives them that agility.  Then there’s the commodity hardware trend–we have boxes where you can have multiple cores and disks and that allows us to push big data to scales more than we have been able to do before.”

Easy integration and on-demand instances are two requirements from the enterprise when it comes to Hadoop integration, but this grand simplification of the cloud also leads to the commoditization of entire industries, across both PCs and servers.  HP is already scaling back its PC efforts, and though they’re high profile VMware partners for their server offerings, they may have to modify in this area as well.

McDougall says that the configuration of servers and storage will change, with an “initial amount of Hadoop being deployed, and the commoditization of storage later.  The change will be in the way storage is provisioned, and at a reduction in cost.”  He goes on to note that smaller customers want to be able to deploy Hadoop quickly, as well as share the workload.  It’s a form of time-sharing a platform, if you will.


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Furrier then asks if either company is worried about a fracturization of Hadoop?  As we’ve noted on SiliconAngle, there’s several companies coming out with their own “flavor” of Hadoop, many of which are commercialized services designed around enterprise needs.  For VMware, its Cloud Foundry product is an encompassing framework that developers can write on top of, with a backend for system scheduling and other administrative needs.  In the future, McDougall mentions that there might be more going on with Hadoop integration.

For Cloudera, a business focused entirely on Hadoop deployment for the enterprise, there’s two areas the company is looking at, starting with the scalability of people.  “Hadoop is good at scaling processing, but how can we get IT admin to manage 10k nodes?”  Awadallah asks.  “Cloudera enables one IT manager to scale this.  We launched the Cloudera CMS Express, which brings down the level of Hadoop installation…we want to make sure they can use Hadoop with the existing infrastructure they have already.”

With such a focus on making Hadoop work for the enterprise, Cloudera has a unique perspective on the industry.  But competition is building–in the last six months alone there’s been several commercialization initiatives gaining attention, from Hortonworks, OpenStack, VMware and others.  But Cloudera does have a three-year jump on its rivals.  “We know how to use this technology and what the needs are to develop it,”  Awadallah persists.  But is Hadoop itself ready for the enterprise?  Not quite, as Awadallah further notes.  “But it’s getting there quickly.”

So when it comes to the democratization of IT and the commercialization of open source solutions, will we eventually lose the chain of command in IT adminstration?  McDougall thinks so.  “At the cloud layer it’s our job to make this run quickly, and you don’t want to have a business unit having to make a lot of decisions,” he says.  “At a higher level you’d expect Hadoop to go towards multitenant Hadoop services.  This job is going to need 100 nodes–give me that straight away.”

It’s an on-demand cloud service the industry is working towards, where managing environments and disparate software is as easy as setting up a website on GoDaddy, or managing a server.  This will present a great deal of opportunity for the startup world, as Awadallah and McDougall agree.  This will also entail a major shift in storage, with less centralized solutions and more localized offerings to make the entire deployment and management process more efficient.  One area of great promise for entrepreneurs is building on this wave of technology.  Data’s value is being uncovered every day, and the ability to run data sets against each other in a more automated and autonomous fashion is the fertile ground for startups looking to the future of business.

Big Data Spotlight: Hadoop, Local Storage Key to the Future is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• HP Data Thrust is Delivering Performance in the Cloud, says HP Exec
• EMC’s Pat Gelsinger Talks Flash Catch Up in Storage Array
• Cloud Foundry Developed on a Vision of Unlimited App Development