Virtualization stalwart VMware Inc. has a lot in store for its annual customer event in San Francisco next week. The company is keeping a tight lid on the details, but Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante and senior analyst Stu Miniman, a recipient of the prestigious vExpert title from VMworld 2012, have a pretty good idea of what we can expect. They shared their personal predictions for this year’s event and discussed some of the rumors swirling about in the channel on the latest episode of SiliconANGLE’s CubeConversations series.

See a timeline of VMware’s key developments over the last 12 months here

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All about the apps

Docker is poised to land a top spot on the conference agenda. The open-source Linux container has garnered a lot of industry interest over the past 12 months, Vellante noted, to the point that it’s now a genuine force to be reckoned with for even the world’s leading virtualization vendor.

“Who’s got the largest container platform in the world? It’s VMware. But Docker is causing a lot of people to rethink the whole application paradigm,” he observed. The project offers a lightweight alternative to traditional hypervisors such as the EMC Corp. subsidiary’s that provides seamless application portability among clouds, a powerful combination for modern web services.

VMware jumping on the Docker bandwagon is made all the more likely by the fact that two of its biggest competitors, Red Hat Inc. and Microsoft Corp., have both pledged their support for the container cause. The former has already integrated the tool into its virtualization solution, a threat that can’t be left unanswered. “Of course we’re going to see Docker at VMworld,” Miniman remarked.

Up, down and sideways

Increasing competition in the hypervisor layer is driving VMware to expand up the stack with value-added capabilities – like Docker integration – as well as sideways into more parts of the data center. The company is competing in the software-defined networking space with a platform called NSX and extending the programmability afforded by the solution to the storage arena via a complementary product called Virtual SAN, or vSAN for short.

According to Miniman, word has it that VMworld will see the latter offering enter a new phase in its development, one that won’t necessary benefit resellers. “Some of the rumors that we’re hearing is that VMware is going to come up with some kind of hyperconverged solution, in which case it’s going to be vSAN with an appliance. They’ve got technology partners like Dell and IBM, and if VMware offers their own option there, then it breaks down those swim lanes, “ he detailed.

That friction is only amplified by NSX and to a lesser degree vCloud Hybrid Service, the virtualization giant’s attempt to wrest market share from Amazon.com Inc.’s wildly popular infrastructure-as-a-service platform. But unlike the latter, VMware’s offering doesn’t leave much too much room for partners to differentiate, which Miniman believes may hamper its long-term success.

“What I hear from ecosystem partners is they’re not sure how to add value and make good money and good margins on what VMware is doing with vCloud Hybrid Service,” he detailed. “It’s still not clear how all the partners can help grow that.”

Thinking strategically

Although significant in its own right, VMware’s drive to expand its presence in the data center and the public cloud nonetheless has to be taken in the context partner company EMC’s broader plans. The storage powerhouse is pursuing a federated strategy that combines its assets with that of the hypervisor maker and Pivotal, a joint cloud analytics venture that the two established last year, into an integrated value proposition spanning the entire enterprise stack.

“They’re joined at the hip and they’re going in a certain direction. Now of course, the position of the federation is they’re going to compete up against each other and they’re gonna give you choices,” Miniman highlighted.

“If you want to do Pivotal, you can run that on Amazon, if you’re working with VMware, of course you’re gonna work with other storage guys, and from an EMC standpoint they’re gonna move forward on [Microsoft’s] Azure – so it’s not just about VMware,” he elaborated. Yet despite all that, the firm stands as an inseparable part of a federation, accounting for over half of EMC’s total available market and much of its revenue growth.

For that reason, Vellante doesn’t see the vendor heeding recent calls Wall Street to sell off VMware anytime soon. “I think it would be a dumb move for EMC to spend that up because EMC without VMware is a much less strategic company, much less interesting to CIOs,” he observed. VMworld will provide a valuable update on how well the company is making use of its biggest assets.

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