What To Expect At Vmworld 2010
OK, I admit it: Im looking forward to VMworld like a kid looks forward to camp
. But for exactly the opposite reason: VMworld marks the end of summer and the beginning of the fall tradeshow season. Summer, despite its all-American goodness, is an odd time for our industryno less busy due to fall preparations, but devoid of the big moves, vision and ideas that make it exciting. Thats saved for the fall, when everyone is back from the beach and ready to listen.
So, if youre ready to listen, youre likely to hear the following themes emerging at VMworld 2010:
From cap ex to op ex
VMware practically owns the franchise on the cap ex value proposition, having proven that the hypervisor hath no equal when it comes to reeling in server spending. VMware CEO Paul Maritz has signaled a heavier emphasis on the op ex side of the equation. Why? I suspect two reasons:
Virtualization is a cap ex boon and an op ex bustas compute capacity is made available by the hypervisor, its quickly filled in with new machines. The result? An explosion in the number of machines that need to be managedand an explosion in operating expense.
The often-forgotten fact that cap ex represents less than 30 percent of overall IT spending. The larger share of cost savingshigher on the mind of the CIOis operating expense.
Consequently, op ex is emerging as the new cap ex and will get considerable attention this year.
Renewed emphasis on business value
The cynical among us may tune out when tech vendors flog business valuethe hollow and disembodied wah-wah-wah of the adult in Charlie Browns midst. But, as an industry, we have a way of dragging the conversation into the weeds and losing sight of what really matters.
Of course, what really matters is delivering value to the business.
Its encouraging to hear Maritz advocating a truth weve advanced for some time: Business value resides in apps, not ops. IT operations enable (or disable) business value that originates in internal, commercial or open source development organizations. Today, the problem is that the typical IT organization stands in the way of this value, slowed to a crawl by manual and bureaucratic processes. This has to change for business value to be unlocked and optimized.
Expect the business value conversation to take center stagehopefully with more intelligibility than the adults featured in Peanuts cartoons of yore.
Automation
A major part of this change will be next-generation approaches to automation. Today, business lines are forced to wait for weeks, months or longer for applications to be moved into production. And changes to production software are unwelcome, because a running systemlike a sleeping dogshould be left undisturbed. Change wreaks havoc on the data center.
This means slow and costly IT, and its the impetus behind the strategic automation investment were seeing in IT todaynew classes of automation far beyond yesterdays script-based approaches in favor of model-driven industrialized approaches to automating IT processes.
Automation and IT management in general will be one of the most important themes this year.
Private and hybrid clouds
The rise of public cloud services like Amazon EC2 and Rackspace have demonstrated a new standard for cost-efficiency and responsiveness that have forced IT to rethink how they measure their own performance. Historically, enterprise IT may have survivedperhaps even thrivedwith incremental performance improvements year over year. But no longer: The game has changed, and IT organizations are held to a higher standarda standard set by public clouds.
Thats why IT is all lathered up by the prospects and promise of private and hybrid clouds. As I wrote last week, Ive seen the future and it is self-service private cloud. Its a beautiful future.
So, thats itwhat I expect to hear at VMworld 2010. Im sure other themes will emergeopen source cloud stacks come to mind. What else do you see on the agenda this year?
Please feel free to publish the above commentary in full or in part with attribution according to the Creative Common license.
by: Jake Sorofman
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