UPDATED 05:58 EDT / AUGUST 29 2012

VMworld: VMware Needs To Bring Sexy Back

I’m here at VMworld 2012 in my hometown of San Francisco, where VMware has been taking great strides to inform its partner and customer ecosystem that the virtualization giant remains as committed as ever to helping enterprises meet the challenges of the mobile, cloud-enabled, BYOD future, thanks to “evolutionary” upgrades to VMware vSphere and VMware View, as well as the new VMware Horizon suite for mobile policy enforcement. But if VMware really wants to make waves in the marketplace, it needs to bring sexy back to enterprise IT.

It’s not exactly VMware’s fault. The time when you could energize an audience of IT decision makers by promising a world of cloud enhancements is years behind us now, and CIOs are looking at the promises of converged infrastructure and the cloud with a far more critical eye. And so, the onus falls on VMware not to make promises, but rather to follow through with solutions that don’t revolutionize the market, but rather refine it and make it easier to manage and more secure besides. Hence, VMworld 2012’s official theme of “Right Here, Right Now” – no hype, just delivery.

But that’s also why VMworld 2012 has a hard-to-miss lack of excitement. Incoming VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger quipped that he was expecting a standing ovation for the elimination of the vRAM licensing model for vSphere, announced during his keynote presentation – but when your most exciting announcement is repealing a license tax that many customers were unwilling or unable to pay in the first place, it doesn’t bode well for the health of the product ecosystem.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t some exciting news during the VMware keynotes: VMware committed to further supporting the OpenStack open source cloud platform (and the so-called multi-cloud future at large), mainly by way of its recent Nicira acquisition.

VMware expects to further develop recent acquisition Nicira’s expertise in software-defined networking, and by contributing to OpenStack, it only helps ensure interoperability between its own software-defined data center solutions and the growing community of OpenStack-based service provider clouds.

That’s good news for fans of open standards in the cloud. But the fact that the Nicira acquisition only closed last week  means that VMware couldn’t expound in more detail on where its technology fits into the VMware portfolio, which was disappointing, even if it was expected. Similarly, the DynamicOps acquisition wasn’t discussed much except to affirm that it’s going to enable VMware vCloud vDirector to eventually enable cross-cloud services virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

And speaking of open standards, there’s some really interesting stuff going on around the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at VMworld. Piston Cloud Computing, which provides private cloud solutions based around OpenStack, announced official support for Cloud Foundry. On the community front, the announcement of new features in vCloud Director 5.1 prompted the formation of Cindarella, a project to enable vCloud compatibility with the Amazon EC2 API. And outgoing VMware CEO Paul Maritz reaffirmed the company’s commitment to the multi-cloud future and open standards.

In many ways, VMware is a company in transition. After leaving Microsoft, Maritz led VMware through the most critical years of the cloud transformation and to a very strong market position, and he remains very popular with the VMware community as a result. Meanwhile, Gelsinger’s succession of Maritz has the industry questioning if this is going to tighten VMware’s relationship with parent company EMC – Gelsinger comes to VMware from EMC’s infrastructure business after all.

Meanwhile, OpenStack is causing a great deal of unrest in the VMware camp. OpenStack is still maturing as a project, but the philosophy behind it – flexible, scalable cloud infrastructure with no licensing costs – is turning heads and causing CIOs to rethink the allocation of their cloud costs. Moreover, advances in other hypervisors, including Microsoft Hyper-V and the open-source KVM, are threatening VMware’s reign.

What I’m trying to get at is simply this: VMware isn’t exactly fiddling while Rome burns. But the market is rapidly changing around it, and while there’s definitely some strong thought leadership here – see our VMworld coverage from TheCUBE for proof positive of that – there hasn’t been much here to reassure customers that VMware is keeping pace.

What’s really needed is a dose of sexy: Something really, truly solid that goes beyond promises and demonstrates that the company isn’t just thinking in terms of licensing models and secure access, but in terms of changing paradigms and the emerging demand for open cloud standards and interoperability.


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