RSSVMware to announce VSphere today
According to diverse media outlets, VMware is set to fire the next shot in the virtualization wars today by announcing their new VSphere product, which promises to allow businesses to create a "private cloud" internally.
It's only natural for VMware to get into the cloud business, considering the close association of the concept with their traditional strengths in virtualization and the slowly rising level of hype surrounding anything with "cloud" in the press release. It's also an astute business move, potentially, since recent surveys regarding cloud computing adoption in the enterprise reveal that concerns over security and reliability (however misplaced) top the list of reasons most organizations identify as obstacles to adoption. Allowing executives who are reluctant to jump on the bandwagon of third-party cloud provided services, but who are nonetheless anxious to get in on the cloud trend in general to do so with internal resources could tap a previously unfilled market.
I've been skeptical of VMware's performance under Maritz and distinctly unimpressed by representations made of their efforts in the past year or so to seize the initiative and beat back Microsoft's inherent advantages in the virtualization market with something revolutionary. I have some doubts about VSphere as well; whether the technology is brilliant or not, it's going to be difficult for all but the most massive organizations to match the economies of scale of third-party cloud providers. Leaving aside the general conclusions of the recent McKinsey "Clearing the air on cloud computing" (which I will cover more specifically in another post) reports that many enterprises could provide services internally more cost-effectively than using cloud providers, if you look at the specifics, they're not talking so much about provisioning cloud services themselves, but simply raw processing capacity. Actually recreating cloud services internally would incur many of the same costs that McKinsey associates with adopting external providers.
VSphere may be able to decrease those costs, but over time, the game will still go to the even more massive third-party providers.
On the other hand, if nothing else, the product sounds as if it may provide the ultimate abstracted realization of the promises laid by Service Oriented Architectures. SOA is an important goal for enterprise IT, for all the body blows it has taken in the community in the past few months. If VMware is offering up, in the guise of an internal cloud provisioning tool, a way to architect services at an extremely high level, it may both surprise and shock CIOs in its ability to help them realize that goal.
This is all premature speculation at the moment, of course, since the announcement has yet to be made and no substantive leaks have yet emerged. But I'm sure I'll revisit the subject later when we know more.
