Q&A Paul Maritz
VMware CEO Paul Maritz has had a good run since taking the helm three years ago. But much of his company's success during that time has been tied to virtualisation software, as opposed to cloud computing, where the Palo Alto- based company sees the future taking shape.
Like many IT vendors, VMware and Maritz still have work to do in getting channel partners on board with the cloud and all of its attendant business model changes. VMware's major cloud infrastructure stack update on July 12 offers the clearest picture of how VMware intends to realise its cloud ambitions and get partners to adopt the service provider mentality to their customers and within their own organisations.
CRN: VMware started off as a narrow hypervisor company that allowed you to run multiple copies of an operating system on a single physical machine. Increasingly, our features are about how to take a collection of machines and get them behaving as a sort of single giant machine, for efficiency and reliability and availability reasons. Paul Maritz: One of the features we have is Distributed Resource Scheduler, where we will actually move applications around in the pool of machines automatically in order to optimise performance, or for high availability, reliability or recovery reasons.
Customers are no longer using our software for server consolidation; now it’s about how they do their computing to get additional reliability, availability and efficiency, and all that stuff's baked into the products. That isn’t something you bolt on afterwards.
When we talk about automation, rather than trying to layer management software on top, we're baking it into the platform itself. The vast majority of code
for vSphere goes toward these automations, that was true of vSphere 4 and it’s even more true with vSphere 5.
CRN: With the Springsource, Zimbra, Gemfire and RabbitMQ acquisitions, VMware has been building out its application stack and development platforms. And with Cloud Foundry platform-as- a-service, VMware is now trying to win the hearts and minds of application developers. This is a new area for VMware – how are you going about getting developers into your camp?
PM: We look at the world in three layers: For the infrastructure that apps sit on top of, the great virtue of vSphere is that it can handle, through virtualisation, almost any existing application. What we're also trying to do for new applications is to get those applications to run well in a vSphere environment. We also want to be able to make money by selling new capabilities to developers of those applications.
Specifically, we’ve targeted people who are writing their apps in these new modern programming frameworks, like Spring, Ruby, Node, etc. Our view is that there's a new generation of developers who will be building a new generation of applications, and we're trying to accommodate them on our platform and also have the business opportunity. Enabling that developer is the second tier of what we’ve been doing with Cloud Foundry.
Third, we’re focused on how existing and future applications will be delivered to the end user in a world where you can’t depend on the end user holding a particular device in their hands. There is going to be a lot of heterogeneity among those devices. We need to give our enterprise customers a way to equip their users with capabilities in a device-independent way.
CRN: Linux came about as a way for developers to get around the proprietary barriers that existed in the mainframe world, and you've suggested that the same sort of workaround will eventually emerge as a workaround for proprietary cloud infrastructure. How does
Cloud Foundry aim to address the proprietary issue? PM: Our view is inevitably someone would do something like Cloud Foundry, so rather than wait for it to happen and have to react to it, we’re putting our hat in the ring there and preemptively offering something there. And we’re trying to do it in terms that are genuinely open, which is why we’re releasing it in open source.
CRN: Is open source the main thing that differentiates Cloud Foundry from other PaaS offerings on the market?
PM: Not the open source by itself. We think that whatever solution comes up, it will almost inevitably be open source – open source is almost a pre-requisite. Once you’re over that hurdle, it then becomes about the specific characteristics that [PaaS] layer has to have.
Cloud Foundry is drawing from the folks who we recruited for that team who’ve worked for Google and other places. We have baked this into it the technical characteristics that we think that kind of layer needs.
CRN: You and Steve Jobs both see the world moving to a post- Windows era. These comments
get a lot of attention, particularly in light of the public sparring that VMware and Microsoft often engage in. However, VMware and Microsoft are also working closely on a number of fronts – can you talk about the nature of this work?
PM: Our customers have a lot of Microsoft products, and our products clearly have to work together with theirs in these environments. Both organisations, Microsoft and VMware, are mature enough to know that that has to happen, and neither of us will look good if we're doing things that prevent the interoperability that customers want.
CRN: Microsoft says Hyper-V is making inroads in the SMB market, and that it’s good enough for what most organisations need. The “good enough” argument is common in IT these days as vendors focus on cost savings in their marketing.
As a company regarded as the “Cadillac” of virtualisation, what’s VMware's view on the “good enough” argument?
PM: We have a spectrum of price points, and ... why accept second best? Is there some virtue in accepting second best? We've tiered our products and taken price points up – and down – over the last two years to make sure people who like the leading technology don't have an unnecessary barrier to getting it. By and large, that has worked.
CRN: VMware is well known in the enterprise, but not as much in SMB. What are you doing to change this perception?
PM: SMB is where we’ve created products like vSphere Essentials and taken our price points down specifically to target that area. And we’ve seen pretty dramatic unit growth down there, all of which is going into the SMB market. It’s not like Microsoft is going to get zero percent market share, but I think they're probably been surprised with how resilient we’ve been.
CRN: VMware's Mobile Virtualisation Platform (MVP) is an interesting product that captured a lot of attention at the Mobile World Congress back in February. Can you
talk about how virtualisation can be used to deliver the one mobile device for work and play?PM: MVP is still very much an experiment. We're going through trials to see how people react to it. We need to see how users are going to react to this concept of having two phones in one phone, and how enterprises will like it.
It's an example of having to deal with this dilemma our enterprises customers face. On the one hand, their employees are increasingly not going to be comfortable with being told they can only have one version of a black laptop with a specific version of Windows on it. There's a huge revolt against that.
Businesses can’t stop these new consumer driven devices from getting into people’s hands. On the other hand, they’re still going to be on the hook to make sure they're operating in a secure and compliant environment, and that their information doesn’t get compromised by a hacked version of Angry Birds and transmitted to Turkemistan, or whatever it is.
CRN: Some handset makers are simply cramming all of the business and consumer features onto a single device without using virtualisation. Can this approach work too? PM: The advantage of virtualisation is that it provides an absolute firewall. The problem is, when you’re cramming everything onto one device, and users are installing apps there from unknown sources, it's very hard for the enterprises to be assured their world isn’t being infected by the consumer's personal world. And virtualisation is a very strong firewall to wall those two things off. That’s why people are interested in it.
CRN: Being able to measure all the moving parts in a virtual or cloud environment is a key requirement for many customers. Can you
talk about how VMware’s recent acquisition of Digital Fuel helps get you to that goal? PM:We’re early on in that journey, but we believe that customers need to become more efficient and better informed both a producers and consumers of IT infrastructure. If
you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Digital Fuel is a step in that direction.
CRN: End user computing is a developing area for VMware. What's behind building your expertise in this area?
PM: Both in the end user area and in the developer area, we're trying to shoot ahead and take some risks. We think there are big changes coming in both how applications are developed and how they’re provisioned and consumed. And this is the time to try and get ahead.
CRN: VMware has tackled many technical barriers in its history, but like any virtualisation and cloud vendor, many of the obstacles you’re facing today are psychological ones. For example, companies are afraid about storing data in the cloud. Can you talk about how VMware works to overcome these fears?
PM: In virtualisation, the good news is that the psychological barriers are largely behind us.
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. This is an issue that we increasingly have to come to grips with as we talk to our customers. My sense is that cloud is where virtualisation was four or five years ago. We’re going to see the same cycle play through.
CRN: Google has been attracting growing scrutiny from government regulatory authorities. As a former Microsoft executive who testified on behalf of the company in its landmark antitrust case, what are your thoughts when you see Google getting this kind of attention?
PM: That’s a political process they're getting into, not a technical process or a legal process. I think one of our mistakes at Microsoft was we thought it was a technical/ legal issue. It wasn’t – it was a political issue. If we’d realised that earlier we’d have probably saved ourselves a lot of pain.
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