A cloud of ashes billows from the Puyehue volcano near Osorno (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
In the past couple of weeks I’ve had some in-depth conversations from executives from both VMware and Microsoft. Both companies are in the process of transforming themselves into cloud powerhouses – in the case of VMware, it’s a growing realization that their bread and butter business, virtualization, is becoming less relevant as cloud infrastructure hides away all the details. For Microsoft, too many years of keeping its eyes on a plethora of different battlegrounds has allowed newcomers to steal parts of it’s more lucrative operations – Apple, Google and Amazon all impact on Microsoft in different ways.
Given all of this turmoil, it’s interesting to see the messaging coming out of these two players, and even more interesting to see how the two seem to be following similar playbooks. For VMware there is a dual-pronged strategy – firstly they’re talking up the Software Defined data Center (SDDC). SDDC (an extension of Software Defined Networking or SDN) is VMware’s vision of the way data centers will be built in the future – a broad fabric of hardware with software (provided by, you guessed it, VMware) to abstract all the tin away from what organizations actually want, which is flexible infrastructure and networking platforms. The second VMware thrust is through vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) which promises to give customer a seamless transition between VMware powered private infrastructure and a VMware powered public cloud. Of course executing on the vCHS opportunity will take time and, as I wrote in a recent post, will result in shockwaves both inside VMware and within its partner ecosystem.
On a call recently with Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of Cloud, I was interested to hear a story that is surprisingly aligned with that of VMware. Anderson spent a lot of time talking about Software Defined Networking (he published a book post about the subject yesterday) and pointed out the fact that Microsoft has run a massive global cloud infrastructure for years and hence SDN isn’t simply a product it sells, rather it is a core part of its operating model. That’s actually pretty compelling – so many people hold SDN up as some kind of conceptual panacea for all infrastructure-ills that we forget that it’s actually something people have been doing for years. Indeed Cumulus Networks, an interesting startup I wrote about recently in a post about SDN, was founded by one of the guys who built the networking operations for Google – another one of the cloud operations powerhouses. After reflecting on my conversation with Anderson it strikes me as a logical marketing approach for Redmond to showcase it’s experience as a cloud operator, in order to build its credibility downstream as a cloud vendor.
The other area that Microsoft is articulating a value proposition, and one I’m less comfortable about, is as the foil for vendor lockin. Some from the open source community might choke a little on the message that Microsoft is helping customers avoid lockin but there you have it. The theory goes that AWS is a proprietary cloud platform and does things only one way and only through relying on (in this case) Microsoft, can organizations get flexibility, choice and the ability to decide between public and private at will.
That is, in my opinion, a dangerous angle to go to market on – it’s being done to death by others (OpenStack for one, but all the cloud migration vendors as well). it’s a strategy that smarts of fear, uncertainty and doubt and isn’t in keeping with the more mature stage the market is at. In fact I’d suggest that a far better approach for these vendors isn’t to ram “the dangers of lockin” down the throats of customers, but rather to embrace the fact that the future is complex and multi-cloud and offer some good options to enable that – I’d posit that’s the reason that CSC bought ServiceMesh this week (and Dell bought enStratius a few months ago) – as a way to enable this multi-cloud opportunity. In other words, sell people on the end results, not on some fear of a potential calamity.
I’m surprised to not see Microsoft pushing a product like Double-Take Move (horrible name notwithstanding) from Vision Solutions. The product is helping customer migrate from AWS and VMware onto Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform – since migration between disparate cloud platforms has been held up as nearly impossible, it’d make sense for Microsoft to be telling the world about this product that allows people to move to Azure sans downtime and rewrites.
Microsoft and VMware are both powerhouses and, despite an arguably slow start, they’re both pushing hard against the AWS hegemony. There’s a need for both of them to move further away from the FUD and more into real world benefits their platforms can bring. Despite these criticism however, both companies are innovating and delivering real value to customers and that gives them an odd-on chance of surviving the tectonic shifts to come
from Forbes.com: Most popular stories http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2013/11/01/in-the-face-of-armageddon-microsoft-and-vmware-get-a-new-religion/
Strap yourself in, it’s going to be a wild ride. In considering the changes we’ve seen in technology over the past year, I’m bracing myself for unprecedented growth when it comes to anytime, anywhere, on-demand information and entertainment.
