Category: Data Center Management

In the week that has passed since VMworld 2012 ended, I have had some time to contemplate the best technologies announced or on display at the show. In reflecting on what I saw at the show and while constructing my short list of what I considered the “Top Two,” it struck me that the premise upon which many of these technologies are based has changed. They are less about filling the gaps that VMware vSphere leaves. Instead they focus on capitalizing on the vSphere platform that VMware has built.

When I attended my first VMworld a few years ago the excitement at the event was palpable. One could almost hardly wait until the opening keynote or to go to another breakout session because everyone innately sensed that whatever they thought they knew about how computer and/or data management was done could change dramatically as a result of attending yet another session and you dared not miss it. Fortunately or unfortunately, that experience changed at this year’s VMworld 2012 as its “Right Here, Right Now” theme implied.

Once the term “virtualization” overcame the stigma of being “evil”, VMware was arguably the largest beneficiary of the corporate transition from the physical world to the virtual one. But as competing hypervisor platforms from Citrix, Microsoft and Red Hat mature, VMware finds its status as king of the virtualization hill under assault with storage vendors publicly sharing they are seeing more customers implementing multi-hypervisor environments. Never one to be put on the defensive, VMware has since moved beyond being a “virtualization-only” provider and is positioning itself in a broader context: A software management solutions provider that can help bring about an end to the schizophrenic state of corporations.