VMware, SpringSource, and What's Not Appropriate To Say
The acquisition of SpringSource that VMware has announced is going to change the way the industry as a whole perceives and segments the key players in the x86 virtualization market. I think most people (myself included) need to change gears and look at the whole thing from a new perspective. In this article I am going to talk more about a concept that I have been thinking about lately: virtualization is becoming more and more broad and deep.
This is clearly becoming a two-horse race between Microsoft and VMware whereas Citrix is going to be forced to gravitate around Microsoft in the "broad and deep" context I am going to discuss hereafter.
When I heard about VMware and SpringSource, all of a sudden I realized the world is changing for all of us virtualization geeks. First and foremost those that have only been bothering about low level infrastructure virtualization details - such as VMotion compatibilities, cluster configurations, storage integrations and so forth - will have a hard time keeping up with what's going on in the industry. Virtualization vendors are "moving up the stack" very quickly so you'd better start familiarizing with concepts and technologies around Development Frameworks, Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and stuff like that. Not the sort of things Systems Engineers (aka infrastructure people) paid too much attention to - until now.
Those that have grown up with VMware in the virtualization arena have always focused their efforts on hypervisor capabilities first (I still remember my very first customer implementation where we were piloting a beta version of ESX 1.1) and subsequently on the infrastructure capabilities that VMware made available throughout the years (things like Virtual Center with all its associated functionalities as well as add-on products such as SRM and the like). This is the "standard dimension" we all are very familiar with and I would define this dimension as broad. Basically VMware broadened its value prop moving from the hypervisor (which is a commodity from a business perspective but a tremendous asset from a sell-up perspective) all the way to make the infrastructure richer and more enterprise-ready with additional functionalities, specifically in the automation space.
This move about SpringSource opens up a whole different dimension which is what I refer to as the deep dimension. In fact if VMware continues to only broaden their hypervisor richness they will always be at the mercy of two things:
- Their competitors might be able to catch up to the same level of ecosystem and thus functionalities.
- Their own potential customers that might not need that vast ecosystem of functionalities and might be satisfied with VMware's competitors' offerings (even if not so broad).
Now, everybody knows that the stuff you can find in your data center is not a function of a technology per se, but rather a function of the business applications they are able to support. Basically your platform (be it a processor, an operating system or a middleware - you define it) is as good as the number of ISVs it has been able to attract over the years (I should trademark this).
