The future of VMware in the cloud era

VMware has captured the server virtualization market and is now eyeing the cloud-computing market, where VMware's software-defined data center (SDDC) technology is said to evolve into a hybrid cloud that delivers it as a service. Now that the cloud market is largely dominated by publicly-owned cloud giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, can VMware's strategy help to carve up the cloud market?

At this year's VMware forum, VMware's chief technology officer Joe Baguley in Europe, the Middle East and Africa introduced a set of exciting numbers: In 2012, VMware's customers saved only 10 billion of dollars in server virtualization. If these customers automate and virtualize the entire data center, the total cost savings will increase by at least six times times to $70 billion.

VMware believes that the future of enterprise it is to provide everything as a service, while software definition data center is the first step. Software-defined data centers allow the entire infrastructure to be virtualized, automated, not just servers, but also storage and networking products, and then managed with software. In VMware's view, this is also the nature of the private cloud structure, and the enterprise can then transfer some of the workload to the public cloud, a hybrid cloud infrastructure that is implemented, and the ability to freely and efficiently transfer applications and workloads.

VMware's openness

Fundamentally, VMware employs an internal approach, and we can see that in the cloud era, VMware has made a huge difference in order to survive. VMware is now becoming more open to other technology and service providers, such as the open source cloud platform Openstack;vmware's Vcloud suite, which supports all private cloud and current public cloud installations on the market. Its hypervisor management suite is also starting to support hypervisor beyond the vsphere platform.

Perhaps VMware has realised that in the era of cloud computing, it is not possible to ignore other technologies, as in the era of virtualization, so start supporting other vendors and technologies in their own tools, or VMware will be second to Oracle. It islands have been put forward for many years and have been there all along. Amazon Web Services is an island, and Windows is an island, and VMware knows that if you don't support other server virtualization platforms, you're creating an island of enterprise infrastructure.

But this open change makes people feel less down-to-earth, and VMware became a member of the OpenStack because of the acquisition of a network provider Nicira,nicira is a OpenStack member. We wait and see if VMware really can be a real OpenStack platinum sponsor.

VMware's SDDC strategy

Now VMware offers customers SDDC choices that customers can use in traditional ways to virtualize part of the infrastructure, such as storage and networking, to gradually evolve data centers, or to purchase Vcloud suite licenses, which include all the SDDC components, And be able to overdo to mixed clouds.

VMware has also done some statistics to demonstrate the effectiveness of the SDDC strategy. VMware revenue grew by 22% in 2012 to $46.1 billion trillion, admittedly virtualization is the most profitable source of revenue, but the cloud sector is more profitable than other sectors.

Gartner predicts that by 2016, 45% of cloud users will apply a hybrid cloud. This March, VMware chief Executive Pat Gelsinger announced a hybrid cloud service to be released by the end of this year that will help VMware480 customers profit from the public cloud without changing existing applications, and VMware has also set up a hybrid cloud service unit.

May 21, 2013, Gelsinger is expected to show us better cloud services. VMware's new cloud business unit may provide a separate public cloud offering, so VMware can compete with infrastructure, the service provider, such as Amazon.

There is no doubt that VMware has a place in the cloud computing market, but it is undeniable that it is still a new vendor, needs to catch up with other vendors, and needs to get more detail out of SDDC's new strategy.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)