Cloud Strategy – VMware’s cloud strategy is still maturing and growing. We have been hearing from Maritz and others that technology is built into vSphere and other products to leverage it as a cloud platform. I expect we’ll be hearing more about some tangible developments with cloud providers out there today. It will be interesting to see if VMware continues to build itself as a cloud platform or if it shifts gears and starts chasing after Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure platforms. Though they have invested in Teramark, without some good explanation, it would be detrimental for VMware to try to be the provider. I suspect the folks at VMware know this and are have no desire to be the provider but instead need to seed the field.
Enhanced infrastructure awareness – VMware and its network and storage partners need to more visibility to each other. Not only do people need to be able to see what is going on under the covers (storage and network) with things like AppSpeed but they also need to be able to make intelligent decisions on how to fix problems. It should be easy for an admin to see what LUN on the storage side has too many VMs without having to interpret naa392dxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx numbers. This is continuing to happen but still has a ways to go.
Desktop Virtualization – The improvements from VDI (2.0) to View (3.1) and continuing to View 4.0 have been good but there is so much work to do. When I meet with customers, the challenges that they face aren’t just getting applications and desktops virtualized from a technical perspective. We need more flexibility to determine not only what desktop a user receives but what kind of desktop a physical location receives. We need application persistence with a physical endpoint. This is counterintuitive to what virtualizing desktops is all about but this is all going to drive back to the persona of both the person and the endpoint. Entrigue Systems, which is being acquired by Liquidware Labs, and other ISV’s are doing this but it needs to be seamless and well supported.
If you have anything you want to know or news to share with me about some of these things, let me know.
