VMWorld 2014 was a whirlwind. The conference attracted 22,000 attendees, more than 250 exhibitors and spread across all three buildings of the Moscone Centre in downtown San Francisco over a five-day period.
There was a lot of news at the show: from VMware announcing new products such as EVO:RAIL, the hyper-converged infrastructure stack, to the company pledging support for OpenStack and containers in its software. Almost all of the vendors at the show had their own news, too — it was hard to keep track of it all.
To boil it down, Network World put together a list of “Winners and Losers” from VMWorld — but please, take that with a grain of salt. The term ‘loser’ is used only after talking with analysts, partners, customers and VMware officials, there are some areas of significant new importance for VMware, and others where Network World, and the broader VMware community, would have liked to see some more action and details.
Winners
End User Computing (EUC) Division
VMware made a big push for its End User Computing (EUC) division at VMWorld. The group has made some big news in the past year, bringing on new executives like Sanjay Poonen from SAP and making the largest acquisition in company history when VMware bought AirWatch for $1.4 billion (€1.06 billion) earlier this year.
At VMWorld 2014, the EUC division was front and centre. Poonen took the prime-time spot of the second-day keynote to make the case that just as VMware wants to manage the data centre and cloud with its software, it wants to orchestrate delivery of applications to mobile end users too. It provides a range of virtual desktops (Horizon), mobile device management (AirWatch) and desktop virtualisation software. VMware is getting hip too: It announced a partnership with Google and NVIDIA to bring hefty graphic processing power to virtual desktops and Chromebooks.
It makes sense that VMware would look to boost its EUC division, as mobile represents a tectonic shift in the IT industry and AirWatch is a leading enterprise mobile management software provider. VMware is looking to extend its reach beyond just server, network and cloud management and get into mobile management in a big way.
Containers
One of the hottest buzzwords and topics of discussion among developers over the past year has been “containers”. Instead of slicing hardware servers into virtual machines, it virtualises the operating system to run applications in “containers,” which allow for easier portability between virtual machines and even over to non-virtualised hardware. Some believe containers could become VM killers.
VMware, which still makes boatloads of money off of its vSphere compute virtualisation software, took on that issue directly at VMWorld. The company said that the best way to manage containers is using VMware software. In doing so it announced partnerships with container management company Docker and Google, which has a newly open sourced project named Kubernetes for managing containers.
OpenStack
One of the most surprising moves at VMWorld to some was VMware’s announcement that it would support OpenStack in its cloud management software. For close followers of VMware, however, it may not have been a huge surprise, as VMware has been active in the OpenStack community since it purchased Nicira a few years ago and even more recently has been a contributor of code to the project.
But, like containers, OpenStack represented what some considered a potential headwind for VMware. OpenStack is an open source project for building clouds. VMware executives made the case that if IT wants to build OpenStack clouds, then they should be managed with VMware tools. The move is a strong vote of confidence for OpenStack, and it supports VMware’s marketing pitch that it will support customer choice for cloud management. What VMware does not mention, but analysts have pointed out, is that VMware is making its own distribution of OpenStack that requires all VMware tools to run. Watching how VMware develops its OpenStack strategy will be an indicator of how the company plans to play in the broader cloud market.
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