Just how seriously should the industry – and more importantly EMC Federation customers – take VMware, Inc.’s vCloud Air? Is it a real competitor to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) leaders like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and IBM Softlayer? Would medium-to-large customers be safe in making major commitments, for example for developing new core customer-facing applications, on vCloud Air, or is that a recipe for being left behind?

Those are questions in the air as the annual VMworld conference kicks off next week. In his most recent Professional Alert, written after and in part in reaction to SiliconAngle’s recent Q&A session with VMware VP of Cloud Services Mathew Lodge (@mathewlodge), Wikibon Senior Analyst Brian Gracely raises a series of specific questions that relate directly to these overall issues.

VMware has been trying to differentiate vCloud Air partly on the basis that it uses VMware’s virtualization technology, meaning that the many companies that use VMware as their primary hypervisor will have familiar infrastructure when they move to vCloud. But, Gracely writes, “demand for public cloud services is being driven by applications, not infrastructure. It’s a market being driven by developers that need frictionless access to resources that will enable faster, more scalable applications….” vCloud Air lacks such native services as elastic load-balancing, queueing and logging. It also lacks managed services either on Cloud Foundry or other, third-party platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technologies it supports.

Neither VMware nor its channel partners have experience in the application-services market, Gracely writes. AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM are all making heavy investments in providing services for their platform users. To compete, VMware needs to make similar-sized investments.

Gracely also raises questions about the revenue growth of vCloud Air versus its competition. He estimates that its quarterly revenues are currently in the $50 million to $100 million range, which he says is generally consistent with where Gartner placed VMware in its 2015 IaaS Magic Quadrant. That is less than two percent of AWS revenues and less than three percent of Microsoft Azure’s.

Gracely lalso asks exactly how vCloud Air “helps modernize apps.” given its lack of some features that are core parts of its competitors’ technologies, and whether it is attracting attention from developers. He says the Developer and DevOps days at VMworld should provide indications of how well VMware is reaching this new audience. VCloud Air will sponsor its first-ever hackathon at this year’s event.

Finally, Gracely wonders whether vCloud Air is a first-class citizen and showcase platform within the EMC Federation or just one of many alternatives that could be part of a Federation Hybrid Cloud solution.

These are questions that may be answered at VMworld. If you can’t get to the conference, watch theCUBE’s live coverage August 31- September 2. You can also use that link to see recordings of interviews with top officials from VMware and other EMC Federation members on theCUBE after the conference ends.

Image courtesy VMware