So have things settled down for VMware now that Diane Greene is out and Paul Maritz is in? Not really, it would appear, as
more rumors
are churning about a possible sale to Cisco. As recently discussed
here
, Cisco is already a minority shareholder with a strong interest in both network virtualization and developing many of the connectivity and infrastructure management piece parts of the so-called next generation data center. The company has the market heft and the cash to pull off an acquisition like this, plus a great track record in the fine art of integrating acquisitions into the Cisco technology base and product porfolio.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/02/20080 comments
Cloud computing is a big tent and there are a lot of interested parties. That includes telecom carriers with AT&T recently launching what it’s calling a utility computing service called AT&T Synaptic Hosting. The company describes it as a “next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses.” AT&T is the largest carrier in the US but also has a huge global footprint as an international carrier which it will likely leverage.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/02/20080 comments
When I was having problems using my Gmail account the other day, I didn’t worry too much about it, although it did give me pause. (Is “loading” the new “hourglassing”?) But when I got into the office and saw some reports about major Google outages, curiousity turned into concern. Good thing Google doesn’t have a tech support hotline for Gmail (Good thing for Google, I mean.)
According to a report in Computerworld, there were some users who experienced outages that lasted more than 24 hours. The glitch also affected end users relying on the Google Apps suite of collaboration tools. Characteristically, Google provided little color as to the details of what happened and why. (How ironic would it be if, as dependency on Google increases, the company were to become every bit as unresponsive an info-bureaucracy as pre-divestiture AT&T ? )
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/25/20081 comments
Jeff McNaught is the “Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Customer Advocate” at Wyse (No kidding, that’s his title, check it out. In fact, all senior executives at the company have “Chief Customer Advocate” after their titles, an interesting touch. There’s also a “Director of People Development”.)
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/25/20080 comments
If management and automation is the new battleground for virtualization, then it will be interesting to see where the innovation comes from in this area. The large system vendors have the advantage of a huge installed base of physical management offerings but at the same time are saddled with limitation of having to innovate incrementally “at the edges” of their existing products via release upgrades.
On the other hand, a company like HP has its hooks into just about every aspect of the next generation data center and is in a great position to leverage the increasingly de-siloed and virtualized components of server, storage, network, and applications and to aggregate individual console feeds into the much vaunted “single pane of glass”. And just for the record, although the largely unattainable but desirable “single pane of glass” goal gets invoked by just about every management vendor we speak to, we’re a long way from this becoming a reality. In fact, I invite you to consider that the problem will get worse before it gets better as we in many cases add yet another management layer just for virtual systems.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/18/20082 comments
The Yankee Group’s Third Annual Global Virtualization Survey has turned up some great data on vendor market share. I’ll mention just a few data points that I think are especially noteworthy. The survey points to some interesting shifts in the vendor landscape. One conclusion is that Oracle is poised for “explosive growth in application virtualization and virtual appliances”.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/12/20080 comments
" I know engineers. They love to change things."
- Leonard McCoy (Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
I’ve been watching the Vista debacle from a safe distance since Microsoft is looking to use application virtualization software from its purchase of Kidaro to address some issues there. The knock of course is that in developing Vista, Microsoft fixed a lot of things that weren’t broken. Ah yes, the impulse to tinker.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/11/20080 comments
In a recent
ComputerWorld
article, "
Microsoft's Online Woes Hint at Larger Vulnerability
," Elizabeth Montalbano writes:
"Microsoft has built its massive software business by watching other companies take the lead in emerging technology markets and then following fast with competitive products that eventually become dominant once those markets begin to pay out. The company did it against IBM during the birth of the PC, Netscape during the browser wars, and is currently making a strong showing against Sony and Nintendo in the game-console market. However, Microsoft's inability so far to capitalize on online advertising and services and its inability to make any headway against Google shows that, despite its huge cash reserves, this strategy may no longer be effective."
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/04/20080 comments
I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all
-- Joni Mitchell, "Both Sides, Now"
Cloud computing is hot. But you knew that. Trouble is, it seems to have become one of those trends that generates so much buzz vendors feel an irresistible compulsion to stand in front of the parade while deftly (or not so deftly) tweaking the definition just enough to get their product or service offering under the tent. Alas, the devil will serve lemonade before this changes.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/04/20080 comments
So reads the title of a recent blog post by Adam Lashinsky (who wrote a widely read
profile of Diane Greene
last year that appeared in
Fortune
.) The posting made a solid point about the performance of the stock: "With shares of virtualization software maker VMware (VMW) in free-fall, it's worth noting that for all the comparisons that have been made between the EMC-controlled (EMC) company and Google (GOOG), VMware's stock has now done something Google's never did: It trades well below it's opening price in 2007. As I noted when VMware went public not quite a year ago, the shares were offered at $29 but opened at $52. At one point VMware's shares soared above $125. Thursday they were down about 5% at $35 shortly before the close." However, I also found the posting interesting in that, read between the lines, it gives an insightful glimpse into the inflated investor expectations mentality that has raised the bar so high for VMware.
Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/04/20080 comments
Editor-in-chief Doug Barney passed along an interesting piece of info to Keith and me about a new EMC marketing initiative. The outreach involves an e-mail promo not from VMware but directly from
EMC's Voyence
marketing team. (Voyence is a configuration and change management company that EMC acquired last Fall). The promo discusses the benefits of virtualization along the lines of "Imagine if you could visualize virtual-to-physical relationships across the data center [and] enforce VMware best practice policies, such as improving utilization by finding VMs no longer in use...." and is signed simply "sincerely, EMC". Clearly EMC didn't waste much time putting itself at the head of the VMware parade.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 08/04/20080 comments