VMware’s Tod Neilsen Drop by theCube at VMworld 2011
Tod Neilsen, former COO and now head of application development at VMware, sat down at theCube for the third time now with John Furrier and Dave Vellante.
Nielsen detailed that he’s now responsible for Cloud Foundry, the company’s open-source PaaS, and vFabric. He noted that the former played a big part in the whole kick start of the open cloud trend, which is a very competitive one with players such as OpenStack gaining moment. Nevertheless, Cloud Foundry is not lagging behind the competition. The company gained 2/5 million Spring developers with the 2009 Springsource deal, and plans on further investing in the platform: “Focusing on both the enterprise developers as well as appealing to the “cool new kids “that are developing new types of frameworks,” Neilsen said.
He continued to discuss the market Cloud Foundry is growing in right now. Unlike before, developers are building new frameworks to make things more cost effective, efficient and simplified in general. Neilsen believes this will consolidate over the next 10 years, for now this requires VMware and others to support all these new emerging platforms in order to stay relevant to the market.
From cloud, the conversation shifted to big data and how the database was split up between Oracle and Microsoft just five years ago. Now it’s a whole different market with a lot of startups innovating around big data analytics, and companies are starting to move beyond MySQL.
“Today people are realizing the relational database is okay for a component, but I also want to have a NoSQL or a big data option”
vFabric Data Director, an offering the company introduced last week, is a shot at capitalizing on this shift. It allows users to scale and automate their database, and supports only posterous now though Oracle, Hadoop and others will soon be added to the list, Neilsen said.
