SYS-CON's Jeremy Geelan does a great job within the virtualization community, and his Q&A series are really informative. Case in point, Geelan recently had a really informative Q&A session with VMware's CTO, Steve Herrod.
Geelan: In your recent VMware Blog you anticipated that 2009 would begin to see the resolution of what you called the "desktop dilemma" - i.e., the business choice of whether to provide thick or thin clients for employees. What specific business and technology vectors make 2009 a decision-year?
Herrod: There are a number of factors forcing IT departments to rethink how they will provide desktop computing to their organizations:
- People are more mobile than ever, using a multitude of devices to do their work
- Compliance and security requirements have increased
- Growing diversity in the types of applications (e.g. Windows, Mac, and Web)
- IT must support all of the above changes with tighter budgets than ever
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Geelan: Aside from the desktop, where else does VMware see most potential growth for virtualization technologies?
Herrod: We have three major initiatives at VMware; Virtual Datacenter OS (datacenter products), vClient (desktop products), and vCloud (connecting enterprise customers with cloud providers). The datacenter side of the business is the most mature, but it's still incredibly early on in this opportunity. We constantly see customers transition their use of virtualization from tactical server consolidation projects to it being the centerpiece of their more strategic datacenter directions. As customers continue this progression, we see huge opportunities for the management and automation solutions that we provide.
And the vCloud initiative is also very early and full of promise. There's a lot of hype over "cloud computing", but we're confident that we will have the tools to make the hype a reality and help enterprises leverage this new computing model for all of their applications and with their management and security concerns addressed.
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Geelan: As you know, SYS-CON as an organization is laser-focused not only on virtualization but also on cloud computing: how does VMware define itself in relation to the new world of the cloud?
Herrod: Virtualization and automation are key enablers of cloud computing, so we feel that we have a major role to play in this new space. Our vision is three fold:
- Help enterprises to run their own datacenters in a more "cloud-like" fashion. These "internal clouds" will be more efficient, deliver compute capabilities on demand, and securely support multiple disparate departments on a shared physical infrastructure.
- Provide a powerful software stack to a broad ecosystem of cloud providers. We'll deliver a suite of software that will help "external clouds" increase their efficiency and provide meaningful service level agreements for their users.
- Provide technologies to connect the internal and external clouds. The beauty of virtualized applications is that they are fully encapsulated and can be transported between datacenters without modification. We're working with our partners to enable this connectivity and let enterprise customers leverage the external clouds as desired... for on-demand test labs, for overflow compute capacity during peak demand periods, or to completely transition a set of their production workloads.
Read SYS-CON's entire interview between Jeremy Geelan and Steve Herrod.