Just a Little Innocent Vendor-Speak between VMware and the Adoring Masses
VMworld Day 2: During the VMworld keynote session this morning, both Rich Jackson, VMware chief marketing officer, and CEO/President Paul Maritz were talking about the steps that VMware customers are taking in their "journeys" to the cloud. From my perspective, I think the talk was a little on the fast and loose side. What I'm pointing out is that when these guys talked about step one in the cloud journey, which is users virtualizing their data centers, Jackson and Maritz both said that most of the customers in the audience had already taken care of this task—which is anything but a trivial undertaking.
It reminded me of a conversation I had with Raghu Raghuram, GM and VP of the VMware Server Business Unit, while I was doing interviews for my cover story on VMware that is now available online at this site. Raghu was telling me that VMware measures its cloud success along two metrics. The first is getting service providers lined up behind the company's vCloud initiative, and during the past year, he said, some 1,500 of them had done just that.
The second metric is enabling customers to deliver private clouds, which he said is the intention of "large numbers" of VMware customers. Based on these developments, he said the company has successfully satisfied both metrics, and then he added what seemed like something of a contradictory comment, which was, "We still have a long way to go in converting our customers over to running their data centers as a private cloud." Which begs the question, have most of them pulled this off or not?
I suppose things could have changed dramatically since I interviewed Raghu early this summer, but I don't think the number of people virtualizing their data centers is going to grow dramatically all of a sudden. I have no doubt that VMware is gradually getting their customers to virtualize their data centers, but I don't think it is happening as fast as Maritz and Jackson said it was.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/31/2010 at 12:48 PM