Is VMware a one hit wonder - TechTalk Episode 31
Transcript
Hi, welcome to episode 31 of Virtualized Geeks Tech Talk. This is an episode that is a follow on to a pretty uh I think uh at least the article wasn't too inflammatory, but the title was which is is VMware a uh one hit wonder? Uh VMware has a really solid product portfolio. Let's let's start off of that by that. uh everywhere everything from vsspear to Vcac to VCD to uh VCenter operations manager to uh VMware log insight manager one of the more recent products to obviously their uh desktop virtualization suite.
They have a huge selection of products to uh choose from. But I think uh just going over kind of those uh products, I think you saw an interesting theme throughout those products. Those products are mainly geared around uh their virtualization platform VSSpear. And when you're a VMware customer, uh, you know, you're kind of in this VMware bubble or this VMware world where you have an awful lot of, uh, management tools and, uh, extensions to your VMware Vspear environment to leverage. If you want to go with a cloud solution, it makes logical sense that you can expand your uh VMware cloud out to the VMware hybrid cloud using uh your VMware vsspear environment or your existing vsenter to expand out to VMware's hybrid cloud service.
Uh uh if you want a good portion of uh data from log insight manager, that's there. Although I don't believe log insight manager is only VMware specific. Uh then there's also VMware Horizon or VMware view obviously which runs on top of VMware vSpear if you want to provide uh VDI as a platform. VMware has a awful lot of products available to uh their existing vsspear customers. But kind of the premise of my article is what happens when uh vendors such as uh Citrix, Microsoft, open- source uh projects catch up to uh vsspear capability.
Obviously VMware uh ts touts a very strong ecosystem management ecosystem but ultimately the question that I'm raising is is that enough to keep the industry lead? Uh, I like to liken it to or compare it to Noville and Noville's domination of the network operating system back in the early 90s and uh very part of the century where uh you know there was just no question if you needed a file and print server if you needed a network operating system network had 82% of the market.
They had built the ecosystem around that. They had their groupwide solution for messaging. They had their firewall solution to uh provide fire firewalling. Uh Zen uh they actually had another product that they had used the Zen uh name. I think it was Zen Works was the name of their uh um desktop management solution. So a very strong uh ecosystem. But Microsoft came away with their general came with their general purpose operating system uh in Windows 2000 and basically made a good enough solution that did enough things with that appeared to be free which eventually eroded uh Noville's market share.
Noville never stopped integrating. they focus specifically on what they did well but eventually what uh just focusing on what you do well is not enough. So ultimately that's the question I have for uh kind of VMware is is focusing on what you do well enough to keep your market lead and and they I think have a much more difficult uh challenge than Noville. You look at uh VMware, they're a wildly successful company built around vSpear. So uh there are nonvpar focused solutions like vcak which which which is their vscenter uh or VMware uh automation center which uh which is you know automation right now is used the ability to manage your inf infrastructure manage deploy uh your infrastructure uh in an automated form very uh critical I think area for them as well as NX XX their network operating uh I'm sorry their network virtualization play which they spent a billion dollars on.
So they obviously have big hopes for that. Are those you kind of you know are those secular uh solutions enough to bridge a organization as large and complex as VMware as the market around vSphere and virtualization tools starts to starts to mature. Is that enough to bridge that big of an organization over to a new uh product base? This is no new uh uh this is no new complication for IT companies or companies that innovate in general. " HP Dale uh looking at servers and desktops and uh PC market.
How do they uh go from having those uh strong um presences in those very mature markets to services software? How do they bridge over those to those questions or to those industries and those different revenue streams? So, you know, that's pretty much it's more of a business question for VMware. And then even from the enterprise uh you know I've asked the question you know similarly how do what impact does it have if you choose a new you know if we rewind back to the early part of the century you know if I chose netware at the wrong time you know I'm stuck with this legacy OS that uh I I have this huge investment or wasted investment in that I have to support for the next five or six years, whatever the the software cycle is at your organization, you know, do you get stuck in that cycle?
I don't think today we're at that risk with VMware. Uh VSSpear isn't going anywhere. 5 is in um incredible uh offers incredible capability. The management suite I think is still unparalleled. So it's I don't think it's a relevant question for today. But forwardlooking uh I think it's a valid question. You know, is VMware uh going to be able to uh kind of spread out the their product line beyond just Vspear and will they pay attention to kind of non vsspear customers?
Well, that's it for this episode of Virtualized Geeks Tech Talk. com for more commentary on uh cloud computing virtualization and IT enterprise infrastructure in general. Like the YouTube videos and look forward to talking to you in the new year. Thanks.
