I am off to VMworld on Friday. I have been checking my visa and confirming my bookings. Not looking forward to the 14 hour flight, but at least it is direct to San Francisco rather than through the nightmare that is LAX.
Full disclosure, I was fortunate to attend VMworld for the first time last year with a complimentary pass from VMware. Once again VMware have provided me a pass for this year’s event. It is a significant investment in time and expense to get to VMworld from Australia, and I am hugely grateful to my employer Dell and my sponsor VMware for making this possible. I have a very full agenda.
Prior to my current role I had somewhat limited experience with VMware technology (I used to work for Microsoft during the VMware 3 glory days). When I first started developing solutions on the VMware platform I was battling with Service Manager and vCloud Director. My formative experiences with VMware were not particularly favourable :)
At the time Dell was OEMing a product called VIS Creator (Virtual Integrated System) from a start up spawned from Credit Suisse called Dynamic Ops. You know where this is heading. Due to some challenging engagements with vCloud Director we were starting to get some traction with VIS as an alternate provisioning platform. VMware saw the potential and bought the company, and Dynamic Ops became vCloud Automation Centre, and Service Manager and vCloud Director have more or less vanished without any customer protest.
The Dynamic Ops acquisition shredded the Dell cloud management story, and after toying with ServiceMesh Dell eventually bought Enstratius as a consolation prize. Anyway, all’s well that ends well and Dynamic Ops was a great fit for VMware and Enstratius is slowly starting to shape up as a very capable system under the Dell Cloud Manager brand.
Dell dodged a bullet with ServiceMesh. I do feel sorry for CSC and their bribery problems with CBA, but it was pretty obvious at the time that it was all smoke and mirrors and CSC had not done their due diligence. It was beyond credibility that the product was capable of performing a significant role in CBA given the complexity of the CBA environment. When I started looking at the Agility Platform product when ServiceMesh were courting Dell I could not find anything beyond some slideware and a very rudimentary policy and workflow engine. My feedback internally at the time was “ServiceMesh’s sole existence seems to be predicated on selling the company to a larger software vendor rather than trying to sell the product to customers! Pure demoware.”
The Dynamic Ops acquisition in July 2012 was an absolute bargain for VMware, and obviously they still had a large war chest to play with as they announced they were acquiring Nicira for $1.26B a couple of weeks later. If there was any resentment in Dell about VMware gazumping Dynamic Ops it faded almost instantly with the realisation that VMware had just dumped on Cisco.
Fast forward to vForum in Sydney in October 2013 and it was clear that the partner landscape was shifting. HP were the Diamond sponsor, Cisco was a Gold Partner and Nutanix emerged as a bronze partner. Dell were not on the major partner sponsor list, as the Quest acquisition had already given Dell a booth on the expo floor. This was also the first time I saw VMware present a coherent Software Defined Data Centre Strategy, although the software defined storage piece was still dependant on partner solutions such as Nutanix and Pure Storage. Given that VMware was a fully owned subsidiary of EMC it was obviously an awkward position to be in and could not be sustained for long, but the vSAN announcements were still a few months away.
Last year at VMworld 2014 it all came together for VMware at last. The SDDC story was compete with the availability of vSAN and the rebadged Nicira as NSX. VMware had a beta release of an OpenStack distribution and went all in with Docker. They unveiled the Evo hyperconverged strategy with the launch of Evo Rail and the announcement of Evo Rack. I came away from last year’s event with the feeling that VMware had regained some initiative in the cloud conversation. The VMware solution was no longer a silo, but with the work on NSX, Docker and OpenStack it gave VMware customers a clear path through hybrid cloud to public cloud.
So why in the last year does it seem that VMware has lost momentum? It certainly was not the lack of new product releases, with the release of v6 versions of all the major product lines. VMware Openstack 1 was released, NSX and vSAN are gaining traction, and vCloud Air has rolled out in numerous locations including Australia. VMware have certainly been running at full speed, in fact too fast for most of their enterprise customers and the consultants and partners that build and deploy their solutions.
But somehow compared to the almost daily announcements from AWS and Azure they seem to be almost standing still. Of course this is definitely pot calling black, Dell is not exactly known for their cloud nimbleness. However the stakes are different for VMware, up until recently they really did not have much competition and their value proposition was unassailable. Now there are many more options for customers, including competing hypervisors and cloud solutions.
There is a lot at stake for VMware this year. They need to ramp revenues from other product lines, not just vSphere. They need more customers to adopt the full vCloud platform rather than just the virtualisation hypervisor. They need to have simpler and better value pricing models that encourage adoption of the full stack. Microsoft bit the bullet and did that with System Centre a few years ago and it has paid off.
The current pricing model for NSX pretty much ensures negligible adoption rates. Time may be running out for NSX, Microsoft have announced support for VXLAN with Windows 2016 and Azure Stack will bring load balancing and a form of microsegmentation, not to mention competition from Nuage and upstart Midokura. Considering that VMware have now owned Nicira for three years there has been relatively little innovation in that time.
I really hope that VMware raises the bar again this year. Can’t wait to find out.