Virtualization's Big Week: The VMware Story

Every year VMware holds its VMworld show, and for the past few it has drawn in excess of 10,000 people. I was there last year and it made Tech-Ed seem small in comparison. This year VMware didn't make a lot of hot announcements. Instead, it reiterated its wish to own the cloud market, both real external clouds and internal enterprise clouds.

VMware has a strong technical set of offerings here based on years of virtualization expertise. My only concern is that it's a closed, proprietary set of offerings. My inside sources say that it may take years for VMware to open up to other technologies such as Hyper-V. Meanwhile, Microsoft is bending over backwards to woo third parties.

I'm not nearly as smart as VMware CEO Paul Maritz, but I do know that for something as sweeping as cloud computing, IT wants choice and for things to be heterogeneous. Tell me where I'm wrong at dbarney@redmondmag.com.  

Posted by Doug Barney on September 02, 2009 at 11:53 AM