Peter Christy

VCE Updated

The EMC analyst conference presented a lot of opportunity to understand what has happened with VCE and Acadia. If you remember, when they were first announced VCE was a consortium that created and maintained reference architectures for specific integrations of Cisco's UCS with EMC storage running on VMware, called VBlocks. At the time Acadia was to be a sales and service JV that would actually build and deliver VBlock systems including optionally running the system for a time. Much has changed. The name Acadia is gone and the JV is now called VCE. VCE now engineers, manufactures and ships VBlock systems but no longer offers extensive services beyond that (it was too confusing to Cisco and EMC's integrator partners). VBlocks are engineered in the sense that great effort goes into integrating all the constituent parts (VMware, EMC and Cisco software releases) as well as integrating storage element management into the UCS management system. The VBlocks are manufactured so that all the component integration is done by VCE and what the customer gets is a ready to use, integrated system. VCE is now up to 700 people (!), and is moving forward aggressively to offer certified integration with important applications like SAP. VCE and EMC report high customer acceptance for the VBlock concept and a very healthy revenue pipeline. VCE works hard to make what it learns available both to the parents and distribution partners (the largest would like to also be manufacturers in this sense), so the part that isn't clear is whether this is a long term function or intrinsically transitional, but for now it seems to be an important enabler in providing pre-integrated systems for virtualization and that seems to have real market traction.

VMforce

VMware and SalesForce just introduced VMforce and interesting blend of VMware's Spring framework with SalesForce's Cloud platform. Once you have authenticated into the Cloud you can drag-and-drop a Spring program from the development environment directly to the Cloud. For applications that leverage what's already in SF and Force.com being able to write programs in Spring is quite powerful. If, as Paul Maritz seems to believe, enterprise Java developers significantly outnumber Windows application developers, this will be a very important step. If the inverse is true then Windows Azure is a much richer program because of all the existing Windows apps, the maturity of the Windows application model and programming tools, and because of some of the other aspects of Azure (SQL data services, the Azure Fabric Controller). Time will tell.

EMC & Systems Management

EMC announced that they had "sold" a significant chunk of their systems management product line to VMware, where of course you have to take "selling" in the context that EMC owns 80% of VMware stock. Over the last five years, EMC had accumulated an attractive portfolio of products, but was left with the ugly proposition of trying to establish themselves in a highly competitive market with strong and entrenched competitors, no simple task. So we surmise that EMC has decided that the right way to penetrate this market is to leverage the transition to virtualization (can't argue with that) and if that's the case to transfer key assets to their software focused child VMware. Of course it's one thing to give something bright and shiny to a child and another thing to have them appreciate the gift and use it. Only time will tell I guess. pchristy@irg-intl.com. 

VMware and Spring Source, Java, System Center and Fabric Controllers

Why did VMware buy Spring Source and how does that illuminate their forward looking strategy? We've been poking at that question for a while. Some parts of the answer are simple: VMware now agrees that competing at the virtual machine level isn't such a good idea because all that is being commoditized and the value tamped down - Think of it this way: customers don't want to have to worry about important decisions at the virtual machine level and would rather put their focus and pay money for solutions to larger problems like running complex applications with good service assurance, cloud computing, SaaS and so on. If those higher levels are more important, it stands to reason that access to and leverage of the developer community is an important aspect. Spring was by far the best enterprise software framework that VMware could buy even though the market price was pretty steep. But, then, all that said and done, what can VMware really do with Spring? From a continuing set of discussions the answer seems to center around the use of Java in enterprise computing. VMware cites impressive statistics for the number of Java programmers and the use of Spring, but what do these numbers really mean ("Statistics and damned statistics..."). If Microsoft's strength in data center computing continues to grow (a fact I think) how important can Java really be? As marketing advisors we love honest statistics that lead the unwary reader to the wrong conclusion, and we don't doubt for a moment that a lot of enterprise programmers know about and make some use of Java. From that point of view, we're sure VMware's statistics are probably valid. But the most important programmer demographic statistic would seem to be the primary language that a programmer uses to get their daily job done. He may know Java but use C++ or even (dare I say the word) Microsoft's C# as his daily tool (without argument, Microsoft's Visual Studio is as good a programmer toolkit as exists). What language is most important for the enterprise developer in this sense? I've only found one company that claims to have this kind of data and their data shows that it isn't Java by a long shot. Of course you could accuse them of being biased. If Java isn't the magic sword (best we can tell), if Microsoft's System Center continues to gain strength (we heard a claim that there are more Windows Servers under System Center management than under the sum of all the competition), and if Microsoft is really actively integrating the Azure Fabric Controller into the Microsoft private cloud vision.... Geez, sounds like an interesting year for virtualization, participants and watchers alike! (If you have your own interesting statistics to share, I'm always available for a "wink wink, nod nod" this meeting never happened discussion over coffee at Philz!) — pchristy@irg-intl.com

Where Does Microsoft Fit In?

Having been infused with discussion of the private cloud, it was time for a regular pilgrimage to MS PDC in LA (a road trip down I5!). Microsoft's offering (and story) is much more complex: they are a huge software company with a wide spectrum of offerings; they have been in the online business for years; they have a long term investment (and large business) in systems management. Ray Ozzie's first big keynote was at the MIX conference in 2008, then Azure was discussed at PDC last year, virtualization and operational management is normally the topic of MMS, and of course TechEd is where the enterprise products are discussed. Utility computing and clouds span all of these venues. In the private cloud discussions, Microsoft's contributions and capabilities are usually deprecated. VMware is clearly the leader in enterprise virtualization and after all, cloud computing is high-end, complex virtualization, right, and therefore clearly not Microsoft's strength. But of course, it isn't so simple. VMware's big recent strategic move was the acquisition of Spring Source and the Spring framework, and Microsoft was deeply into frameworks (first MFC and then the .Net framework) long, long ago, and Microsoft has a long term investment in system management as well, with a systems management business comparable to all of VMware. And then of course, Microsoft has been building very large scale Web properties including Azure. So who exactly is to say that Microsoft can't do private clouds and utility computing? Certainly not Microsoft. It wasn't the focus at PDC. Azure, Windows 7 and Silverlight were. Azure goes live as a business in January 2010 and it looks really interesting based on what's been done so far. Specifically, in a parallel effort, Microsoft has been developing SQL Services for the cloud, now rebranded as SQL Azure, and at PDC they announced "Dallas" — a project to build relationships with all sorts of interesting data providers, and make these data sets available, on demand, priced by the sip, on Azure. And then the Live Labs team talked about Pivot, a tool that allows for the visual browsing of large data sets using the Deep Zoom technology (also integrated with Silverlight although Pivot isn't yet a Silverlight application). It's sort of like the BestBuy eCommerce interface on your favorite data set (you have to see a demo to really get it I'm afraid). Quest Software demoed an Active Directory backup service built on Azure (it really highlights the value of all the Windows infrastructure compatibility). And then of course all of the Office/Exchange/SharePoint stuff is increasingly wound into this model as well. And then there is Silverlight, which grows more powerful by the day (literally) — some 26 months since it was introduced they are beta releasing Silverlight 4. The Silverlight team thinks that usage will start to explode when they can reach 50% PC penetration (Flash is still higher). At the Silverlight 3 launch this summer they were at 33%; at PDC they said 45%, so 50% by the end of the year looks quite possible (Microsoft gains installation share the good old fashioned way by doing things like NFL Sunday Night Football and the upcoming Victoria's Secret fashion show). The point is that if you add up everything Microsoft is bringing to bear its pretty amazing and seems to sort of fit together in a tantalizing way. The back story is that Microsoft is working to integrate the Azure Fabric Controller (what was developed beyond Windows to make a Cloud version of Windows) with System Center as the basis of a private cloud technology. It was hinted that they are in Beta with significant customers (since Azure goes business live in a month, the code base is reasonably shaken down). We think all this will come to light in the first quarter or so at Mix or MMS.

Autonomic Computing (Redoux)

In the last issue I wrote about how VMware's acquisition of SpringSource gives them a way to interact directly with application developers, and how valuable a framework may turn out to be in Cloud and Utility computing as a way of solving important infrastructure optimization issues (like edge acceleration) without requiring the application developer to understand all the nasty bits. VMware has something even more important in mind I think: what their Analyst Day talks hinted at was that they thought that applications built on the framework could be instrumented and automatically managed as a result. If you remember, IBM tried "Autonomic" computing some time ago, and couldn't really make it work. It seems pretty clear that an executable binary is much too cryptic to make sense of at run time for broader management purposes. Things improve with virtualization because it's much easier to see what the application is doing (if not to understand it). With a framework, things improve still more because you see more of the program structure at the framework abstraction layer, and as VMware notes, you can instrument the framework to give you more useful information about what the program is doing. Are these changes enough to make something like autonomic computing really work? Remember, the goal is a smart data center than automatically dynamically adjusts to accommodate evolving load, hardware and software failure, issues of scaling, ... Our friends at Microsoft would argue I think that this isn't going to work for VMware. Microsoft thinks that by the time you get an executable program all the interesting information about the program (the design intent, how it performs and scales, how you can tell it's in trouble) has been removed or encrypted beyond all hope. Microsoft's approach (Dynamic IT) is based on the idea of capturing and preserving key design and operational data in a declarative form, and using all this in the data center to achieve the goal. Virtualization changes the game enough to make VMware's direction worth looking into, but if you asked me now, I wouldn't bet the rent money they can make it work anymore than IBM could.

VMware Acquiring SpringSource

Paul Maritz seemed a little discouraged that the analysts didn't want to ask questions about SpringSource, which is understandable since the acquisition clearly has strategic importance for VMware beyond the $420M they are paying (not chump change). The lack of questions isn't surprising if you ask how many of those analysts really know what a framework is (having managed Dev Tools for Apple, I do.) The underlying question is whether VMware can thrive building systems that manage virtual machines or whether they need to get much more involved in what happens within those VM's in order to solve the customers' important problems and profit by providing those solutions. I've never thought that VM's were the do-all, end-all, and apparently VMW has come to the same conclusion. A framework is an architecture for implementing applications and a lot of code ("subroutines" in the good old days) to support that architecture and make application programming easier by providing a higher level abstraction. Utility and Cloud computing have great benefits but come with their own challenges. For example, what kind of data storage systems work well across multiple data centers and improve application performance for remote users? Or how do you know enough about what an application is doing in order to better automate its operation (e.g., provide desired availability and scaling)? In both cases, VMware's ability to play in the game is considerably improved with access to a framework than if complex technology can be largely concealed under the framework abstraction and just come to play when needed behind the scenes without much involvement from the application programmer. Microsoft already has broadly used frameworks (Microsoft Foundation Classes and more recently the .NET Framework). It's really hard to create a framework from scratch — the value of a framework goes up quickly as more people use it so you need both the framework and the users. The Spring Framework was created as an alternative to complexity of what Sun had developed for Java application architecture, and caught on in no small part because it was open source and free. As a way of getting into the framework business (more specifically, getting in a position of influence with the developer community and being able to add mechanism behind the scenes) VMW didn't have many alternatives and SpringSource was by far the best, subject only to the high cost (spending $420M for SpringSource isn't "accretive" by any stretch of the imagination). As noted above, it isn't as if MS doesn't have frameworks or developers — they certainly do —  but it does redefine how VMW views the competition and competes. (VMware declined to comment on this story)

Virtualization and Security (Redoux)

Up until now, VMware treated security by saying as little as possible about it, knowing that arguing that virtualization didn't open up new security surface area just gave credibility to the thought that maybe it did (let sleeping dogs lie) which could only impede sales. Now that VMware is looking beyond the individual virtual machine, and thinking about the Cloud, they have started to talk (credibly) about how virtualization actually helps security. The issues are ultimately complicated (thank goodness there are bright analysts to think about them J ) but here's the basic story line. (1) If you want to talk seriously about the Cloud or even utility computing you need to talk about entire applications — virtual applications or Vapps — that include all the bits needed to get the job done, not about single virtual machines. (2) In order to deploy a Vapp to the Cloud (or even to a private utility or DR data center) you need to specify how it is to be protected. At first blush, a good answer is "just like you did before" except now the security can be largely provided by virtual appliances rather than the physical appliances used previously. (3)When specified on a Vapp by Vapp basis, and implemented by virtual appliances, the security can be as specific and customized as desired. For example, you can think about offering data leakage protection (DLP) tailored to the function and specifics of the application. You need to bind these security specifications in with the other application details so you know what else needs to be provisioned when the application is provisioned and you know where you can and cannot run the application (e.g., what other applications you can co-mingle with). Where it makes sense, part or all of the security can be specified parametrically (e.g., "PCI protection") so that as the regulations change, the specifics of the protection change automatically. VMW's observation is that binding security to the application and assuring it is provisioned as specified is a lot better than what we have now, where in most cases this is partially a manual process, and often requires coordination between multiple teams, all of which is complex, expensive, and prone to errors. The automation also makes it possible (and reasonable) to be much more specific about each application which is also good. Thus, virtualization makes security easier and better.

The Virtualization War

At the Microsoft Virtual Analyst Meeting, Muglia chirped happily that he was gaining hypervisor market share every day. Although we think that must be true, we couldn't get any of the underlying data so we couldn't de-spin it. As we continue to muck about in the Cloud and Utility Datacenter, it's pretty clear that's still all about VMware. So what does the future portend? I continue to think that Microsoft is strongly in the game. The most recent financial reports give an interesting perspective on this. VMware has suffered a year of quarter-over-quarter declines in license revenue, buffered somewhat by rising service revenues. This isn't necessarily a bad report, but at the most recent report Microsoft reported that System Center - the System Management tool that in the end is probably what VMware competes with - grew at a very healthy year-over-year rate of 30% (independently we have heard that it is about a $1.5B/year product. That suggest that System Center is significantly bigger than VMW (comparing apples to apple if that is possible) and growing much more rapidly. As we said, it would probably be premature to count Microsoft out now.

Rising Clouds

Cloud announcements don't seem to have been slowed much by the economy. It is still a very complicated and murky topic but there is no doubt that there is something important underneath. Recently VMware introduced the fourth generation of server virtualization infrastructure (now V-Sphere) as a Cloud operating system. At MMS, Microsoft spent a lot of time talking about Cloud as well. We think that Microsoft does the best job positioning Cloud within the spectrum of IT technology and architecture (although it's of course self serving since MS would have the most to lose if the world were to migrate rapidly to primarily Cloud models) and between Windows Server , System Center, Azure, Office 14 and Live, Microsoft is investing heavily in Cloud solutions. VMware still has a clear lead in exploitation of virtualization although there seems to be growing agreement that virtualization is in fact just one pillar of the solution. HP and IBM both are strong players for sure. It will be interesting to see what Google says at their upcoming developer meeting.