VMworld this year is all about the changing of the guard at VMware(s vmw) -- in more ways than one. This is a company in transition as its core server virtualization business continues to get commoditized. Here are 5 ways VMware showed itself to be a company in transition this week.
1: CEO swap-out
Most obviously, the conference showcased the passing of the baton from CEO Paul Maritz to new CEO Pat Gelsinger.
I'm going to keep preaching "2013 the year of the commodity hypervisor." VMware did and is talking about the areas they had to move into. They've milked the hypervisor as much as possible and need to leverage their skill and IP to fight the management suites of the other big providers.
This meant embracing OpenStack and playing nice with KVM, Xen and Hyper-V. I promise that these solutions will be good enough in 2013. Microsoft is throwing Hyper-v into Windows 8. Which could be an area of opportunity for VMware.
Which leads to the discussion on client side virtualization where Citrix is constantly schooling VMware. I like VMware solutions on whole but XenDesktop is a better product than View.
I still need to watch the keynote from today but I don't believe virtualization will save BYOD. We need real enterprise applications on mobile devices that integrate with each individual platform. I need my customers to be able to use Siri but secure enterprise data. This is a challenging problem but, I look to smart people like the folks at VMware to solve it. It's been a long time since the wowed me and VMware is smart enough to wow.
