Transitioning From The Enterprise To The Cloud

By George Gilbert

This post originally appeared on GigaOm here.

VMware has finally joined Microsoft, IBM and Oracle as one of the four horsemen in the market for platforms for building, running and managing corporate and cloud applications. With its SpringSource acquisition, VMware can now compete with specialized platform-as-a-service offerings like Microsoft’s Azure. In addition, SpringSource’s introduction of Cloud Foundry yesterday makes a crucial connection between deploying Spring-based and other Java applications in the enterprise and the cloud while giving developers an increased ability to manage their applications in a self-service mode.

Before the SpringSource acquisition, VMware faced potentially diminishing returns by putting a layer that manages virtualization on ever more of the enterprise infrastructure. That layer, which VMware pioneered and dominated, cracked open Microsoft’s control of the hardware by sliding a hypervisor underneath the operating system.

(more…)

By George Gilbert

Server virtualization upends enterprise software business models because database and middleware licensing in an on-demand virtualized world will enable customers to buy and deploy capacity “just in time”
instead of “just in case.” Server infrastructure software vendors including IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are participating at varying speeds in this radical transformation.

Today, server software capacity is ‘chunky’ because the database and middleware licenses are typically allocated and bound to a physical box in perpetuity. In the future, customers will demand the ability to allocate additional capacity for their virtual machines on demand from their aggregate pool of license capacity. The transition to a pricing model where customers are able to pay for smaller increments of capacity in smaller increments of time will be highly disruptive to current vendor business models.

(more…)

By George Gilbert

Our most recent report illustrates how server virtualization will disrupt the storage, database, and middleware markets while creating large new opportunities in business continuity and cloud computing which VMWare is well positioned to exploit.

Based on feedback by 200 IT customers on vendors VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Symantec, CA, BMC, NetApp, EMC, DELL, and HP, the report concludes:

Private cloud computing is the largest new profit pool in the virtualized data center.

Virtualization will transform IT investment from a fixed capital expenditure to a variable operating expense, delivering 10x greater IT staff productivity in the process. Cloud technologies in the enterprise, growing out of virtualization and service-oriented management, transform disparate applications and infrastructure into services that are delivered on-demand. VMWare will face greater than expected competition from Microsoft and is turning towards systems management vendors such as BMC and CA for partnerships.

(more…)

By George Gilbert

The recent posts about the economics of cloud computing between Nick Carr and Tim O’Reilly (here and here) and the panel at this week’s Web 2.0 have created a lot of buzz. The central question is of great consequence: will the emerging “cloud” operating system generate the monopoly rents and industry control that Microsoft enjoyed with Windows? For the sake of argument, let’s assume VMware is leading in private enterprise clouds and that for now Amazon leads public ones with Google, Yahoo, Rackspace, and Microsoft as contenders. It seems likely so far that Microsoft will have a significant advantage in private clouds, though not to the same extent as with Windows. Public clouds seem years further out, so they’re harder to handicap.

But at the center of the argument is whether dominance in either variety will come via Web 2.0 style “harnessing collective intelligence” or the more traditional “network effects.”  I believe we will see Microsoft emerge as a leader in private clouds in 3-5 years and it will be on account of the more traditional network effects.  Market share won’t accrue to the leader by virtue of capturing more information every time someone uses the cloud.  Instead, it will accumulate the way Windows steadily accumulated application and device support over time.

(more…)

By Juergen Urbanski and George Gilbert

VMWare’s Opportunity to Expand Into and Potentially Disrupt Adjacent Markets

By George Gilbert and Juergen Urbanski

We’ve talked to a fair number of VMware customers and investors over the past few weeks.  In the process, we’ve repeatedly been asked whether VMWare is done with its phase of hyper-growth.  While it isn’t likely to grow anywhere near triple digits again, it is likely to grow into a strategic platform provider for both data centers and desktops, though this will require solid execution in a tough macro environment.  Its opportunity comes from its chance to both expand and disrupt a series of large adjacent markets.  The ripple effects of this sea change in computing will also affect many markets which VMware has no plans to compete in, though that will be fodder for future posts.  (Disclosure: the authors own shares in VMware)

VMware’s biggest near-term challenge is that it over-sold both units and high levels of functionality with their enterprise license agreements.  These ELA’s were an attempt to encourage customers to deploy more virtual servers with richer functionality ahead of Microsoft’s entry into the market this past summer.  While this may have had some success in making adoption of Microsoft technology more challenging in some accounts, it has actually had unintended side effects.  It left VMware competing with its own inventory of licenses already on the shelves of its customers.  While VMWare works its way out of that near-term hole, some have lost sight of the bigger picture opportunity.

(more…)

Rumors of an alliance between Cisco and VMware have been swirling with varying levels of intensity for some time.

What’s the business problem that a potential alliance needs to address?

1) The most obvious one is that current VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS), Disaster Recovery (DR), and High Availability (HA) functionality built on core capabilities like VMotion are incomplete. It’s hard to move the Virtual Machine (VM) for spare capacity or to deal with downtime to any random server and maintain the connections to the same isolated data and storage area network (SAN). Instead, administrators either have to open up the network so any server can see any other server and any storage device, a security risk, or they have to manually remap the connections.

2) The less obvious and more speculative problem to be addressed is the management and automation of business services across resources and applications. It is still primitive, though the big 4, CA, BMC, HP Openview, and IBM Tivoli are all hard at work addressing this, and CIOs are looking for the provider of a strategic, new provider.

(more…)

By George Gilbert

This is our first set of hypotheses about how virtualization is impacting each of the layers of the IT stack. We will elaborate and refine them as we continue to collect insights from vendors and our upcoming survey of IT decision makers.

The Ultimate Objective

· It’s more than just the savings from server consolidation and more than just greater flexibility in managing planned (VMotion) and unplanned downtime (disaster recovery, high availability)

· Ultimately, it’s about automating the data center in order to make it easier for companies to deliver online business and consumer services. The iconic example of an online service that complemented a traditional business was the Sabre travel reservation system born in the ‘60s. It was based on purpose-built infrastructure that required intense collaboration between the customer, American Airlines, and the vendor, IBM. More recent examples include Fedex package tracking or the familiar dot.com services from Amazon, eBay, and Google. In order to make it easier for businesses to build or assemble end to end services from existing assets, technology vendors have to convert “assets” into “pools of services” using virtualization at every layer of the IT stack.

Looking at the IT Stack Layer by Layer

(more…)

I was really intrigued by David Kirkpatrick’s last story on Microsoft and Yahoo in Fortune Magazine.
His key insight was about search market share creating a more liquid marketplace for advertisers.   Search market share drives up the demand for and value of keywords.  That’s why Google’s search ad revenue share is even greater than its search query market share.

But there’s one other thing that Microsoft doesn’t mention when it talks about purchasing just “search”: there really is synergy between search ads and display ads, which is where Yahoo gets the majority of its revenues.  It’s very hard to measure the value of display ads because they don’t surface when a user does something that shows their immediate intent (e.g. search for a lawnmower) - that’s why they can only charge for eyeballs/impressions while search engines can charge for clicks on keywords.

But everyone knows that those display ads create brand equity or other awareness that search ads ultimately get to monetize.  So all the major online vendors (MSFT, Yahoo, GOOG) who happen to have both major display ad networks (Google’s I think was built on Doubleclick) and search engines are planning to track what display ads users look at over time.  Then they will be able to correlate that with later search queries and search ad click-throughs.  In other words, they are finally going to start attributing more value to the display ads, which have never really been measurable.  But Microsoft has a plenty big display ad network so they just want to carve the search business from Yahoo.  And Yahoo is under such pressure to do a deal that they’re willing to sacrifice the future synergy of their search and display ad businesses.  Without search, they won’t be able to offer advertisers the same measurement capabilities as Microsoft and Google.  Their display ad pricing and revenues will suffer as a result.

They have been unable to articulate this synergy, or any other part of their strategy for that matter. It’s ironic, but they probably would be able to leverage that synergy with the Google search deal.  They also seem to be turning their internal platform for their properties into an Internet scale Web developer platform.  But they can’t even convince their top talent to give them some breathing room.  It’s game over.

Whether subscriptions or perpetual licenses, it’s still about user-based pricing

Imagine for a moment that you are at IBM and a small supplier of components from the Far East has just submitted an invoice. It just shipped an order of printed circuit boards to IBM’s networking equipment division in upstate New York. IBM receives it and a clerk in its invoice processing department enters the invoice into its ERP system. Whether IBM bought a client/server or software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP system doesn’t matter. The clerk has to fill out and navigate as many as 20 screens to enter the invoice so the purchase to payment process can move to the next step.

But go back to the distinction between client/server and SaaS applications. Conventional wisdom says that SaaS applications such as SalesForce.com and their subscription licenses represent a threat to the perpetual licenses and the business models of traditional client-server companies such as Oracle or SAP. Stretching payments out over multiple years, as SaaS does, makes it harder to show the profitability and growth that comes from the upfront payments of perpetual licenses. The reality is somewhat different. As many know, SaaS actually takes in significantly more revenue over the product’s lifecycle. But the pricing models have much more in common than their differences. They both charge based on the number of users accessing the application.

(more…)

George Gilbert

From Virtualization To Cloud Computing

Virtualization and cloud computing have been getting a ton of buzz. But there has been less discussion about how virtualization, now known mainly for its server consolidation capability, will morph into cloud computing. For that to happen, servers, storage, and networks have to all fuse into one virtual machine from a developer’s and an administrator’s perspective. If the rumors that Cisco will buy EMC (and by extension its majority stake in VMware), the industry will have the first vendor who has a credible shot at putting together all the pieces. This post and the one that follows attempt to layout the different ways this transition could unfold. (Disclosure: I’m an investor in VMware).

Cloud computing, previously known as utility computing, is where all computing resources in Internet data centers look to users, developers, and administrators like one giant computer. It offers seamless scalability and radically reduced administrative overhead. There is more than one path from today’s virtualization to tomorrow’s cloud computing, and they’re not necessarily straightforward.

Ray Ozzie highlighted the importance of the transition from virtualization to cloud computing as one of the “three core principles that we’re using to drive the reconceptualization of our software so as to embrace this world of services that we live in… Most major enterprises are, today, in the early stages of what will be a very, very significant transition from the use of dedicated application servers to the use of virtualization and commodity hardware for consolidating apps on computing grids and storage grids within their data center. This trend will accelerate as apps are progressively refactored, horizontally refactored, to make use of this new virtualization-powered utility computing model. A model that will span from the enterprise data center, and ultimately, into the cloud…”

(more…)