VMware CEO Paul Maritz: Cloud Checkmate

If virtualisation is a cloud stepping stone, then VMware’s updated cloud infrastructure stack represents a smoothly paved roadway, one that gives customers and partners the performance and scalability to build cloud services businesses and the security and disaster recovery to maintain IT operations on the back end.

Maritz has been busy gobbling up some of the industry’s best and brightest IT talent, recruiting two of Google’s top engineers to help build Cloud Foundry, a platform-as- a-service for the next generation of cloud applications.

“We’re trying to shoot ahead and take some risks,” said Maritz in an interview with CRN in late June. “There are big changes coming in both how applications are developed and how they’re provisioned and consumed. This is the time to try and get ahead.”

Just how far ahead does Maritz want to get? To say he has his troops thinking big would be an understatement. In a recruiting video from the Americas Partner Operation Sales team, senior director Bob Crissman, said he saw no reason why the company can’t move from $3 billion to $50 billion in annual revenue. “We're not going to be just the infrastructure for the cloud,” says Crissman. “We are going to be the cloud.”

This kind of ambition comes with a price, however. In the case of vSphere 5, VMware customers are angry over licensing changes that will require some to pay more for the virtualisation infrastructure they already have in place. VMware previously pegged vSphere licensing to the number of server cores, but vSphere 5 licensing is based on the amount of memory customers allocate to virtual machines on the host.

VMware says the new licensing model better reflects the cloud delivery model. But selling the future is no easy proposition, and while VMware channel partners can grasp the significance of VMware’s cloud infrastructure stack updates, not all are ready to commit to the investment that deploying it will require.

“Cloud is still an issue where people still don’t quite know what it’s going to mean for their organisation, in terms of how to manage IT, structure internal IT departments, etc,” says Maritz.

VMware’s cloud conundrum

The strategic significance of VMware’s cloud infrastructure stack can’t be overestimated.