Analyst Mark Bowker on VMware and Its Competitors

In keeping with this week's theme of posting interview outtakes that would have otherwise ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor, I offer the following quotes from Mark Bowker, senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group:

"There's no doubt that VMware's making significant efforts to help customers move beyond cost and containment investment."

"In the long run, it shouldn't matter whether a service provider is running VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, XenServer or some other Xen product. An IT organization is essentially paying for an SLA. They just want to know that their application's running there, is available at this point and has this type of security around it. What hypervisor it's running in the long term shouldn't matter."

"Even if VMware is much more expensive than their competitors, people are still thrilled with them. They feel they're getting what they paid for. Even in scenarios where people believe it's a wash if they deploy something on physical versus virtual, they're getting other benefits around either management, mobility, or being able to perform online maintenance, and they're seeing higher application availability. People are always going to struggle through the licensing model a bit, but there would have to be a significant--and by that I mean 30 percent-plus--difference in pricing for most of the people I talk to before they would make a change."

"The most interesting thing I've seen VMware do this year is announce Horizon Application Manager. Today, its aim is to broker Software-as-a-Service types of applications to centralize identity and access management. Over time, the goal is to also bring in desktops, be the broker of desktops from both a VMware perspective and a Citrix perspective."

"I hear very few, if any complaints about VMware."

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/11/2011 at 12:48 PM