As if there hasn't been enough “disruptive” news this week already, the recognized virtualization leader has announced the delivery of the first operating system which can be used to build out a “real” cloud computing environment within internal IT environments – why do this? Well VMWare is touting cost savings, decreased complexity and increased scalability as being the rationale, and in this economic climate, it makes a lot of sense. Or does it…. 
For those who have been around for a while, it's almost like what's old is new again. We came from a past where “dumb terminals” connected to a “giant brain in the sky” was very common. We moved away from that model for lots of good reasons, and it has been a struggle for many companies to buy into the “cloud concept” for a variety of reasons. Information Security, Availability and Privacy and Availability have been big barriers. We all recall the recent RIM Blackberry and Amazon S3 outages – there is a signficant risk to this connectivity model which includes “lobbing over to the nearest cloud” your critical business data and the subsequent implied trust that you can retrieve it whenever you want, and no-one else. This is where I think VMWare has got this nut perhaps cracked – and Charles Babcock over at Information Week wrote this article that taked about how virtualization management coupled with Internet Networking and Web Services, could really be game changers for this enterprises that did not want to wade into the “Public” cloud computing model. With VMWare already well entrenched in corporate data centers, and companies now looking at their application stack, and looking to gain the same type of leverage with the “apps” that they have with the “hardware” and “storage” virtualization activity – this is great news for VMWare (and EMC who owns 86% interest) and should serve to propel them ahead of the Microsoft and Linux players. VMware has been one of the fastest growing software companies in history, with revenue rising 42% last year to $1.88 billion. The Wall Street Journal covers this well in this article as well. Liked this post? Browse through all my posts here. Thanks…Pedro 
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