As if there hasn’t been enough “disruptive” news this week already,the recognized virtualization leader has announced the delivery of the firstoperating system which can be used to build out a “real” cloudcomputing environment within internal IT environments – why do this?Well VMWare is touting cost savings, decreased complexity and increasedscalability as being the rationale, and in this economic climate, itmakes a lot of sense. Or does it….
Move Over Amazon, Google, Windows 7 – It's all about who you trust!
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 brainin the sky” was very common. We moved away from that model for lots ofgood reasons, and it has been a struggle for many companies to buy intothe “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 thesubsequent 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 articlethat taked about how virtualization management coupled with InternetNetworking and Web Services, could really be game changers for thisenterprises that did not want to wade into the “Public” cloud computingmodel.
With VMWare already well entrenched in corporate data centers, andcompanies now looking at their application stack, and looking to gainthe same type of leverage with the “apps” that they have with the“hardware” and “storage” virtualization activity – this is great newsfor VMWare (and EMC who owns 86% interest) and should serve to propelthem ahead of the Microsoft and Linux players.
VMwarehas been one of the fastest growing software companies in history, withrevenue rising 42% last year to $1.88 billion. The Wall Street Journalcovers this well in this article as well.
