View From Above » VMware

VMware’s Evolving Social-Cloud Strategy

Ron Miller — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:44:56 +0000

These are clearly good times for VMware. As Cloud Ave reported earlier this week, profits are up — way up. And even as they make money, VMware has quietly taken a distinctly social stance. In fact, over the last 18 months, the company has purchased three important social pieces.

It started with the purchase of Zimbra in January 2010. At the time, as with many purchases when the overall strategy is not clear, Zimbra might have seemed an odd fit. After all, what did VMware need with an email/collaboration vendor?

Then last April, the next target was SlideRocket, a cloud-based slide creation vendor. You could sort of see how buying a cloud vendor might fit in with VMware, but up to now they’ve had a distinct focus on the back end, so on its own, SlideRocket didn’t necessarily seem like a VMware kind of target.

Finally, earlier this month, VMware completed the social purchase trifecta when they announced the purchase of Enterprise 2.0 software firm, Socialcast. And with that you could see that that all of these purchases were about building enterprise social networking into the VMware software stack.

Yet VMware did not have a presence last week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. It could be because, it purchased Socialcast so close to the conference, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they show up in the Fall at the west coast version of the show in Santa Clara.

VMware has some nice pieces here, but it’s unclear if it can take these parts and put them together into a coherent social software package and relate it back to its cloud-virtualization core mission.

And it’s not exactly alone in the social space.

In fact, there are several key players shooting for the same enterprise customers as VMware including Cisco, IBM, SAP and of course Microsoft. And that doesn’t include up and coming companies like Jive and Yammer, which are making a big impact in the enterprise social space.

But VMware is coming at this from a cloud-virtualization angle, which makes it a bit of a different animal from the other competitors in this space.

Perhaps, VMware is in a position to understand better how cloud-based services like these recent purchases can be folded into the enterprise than these other vendors, which tend to be focused on-premise. To be fair Microsoft does offer a cloud-based version of SharePoint, but Microsoft is still very much a traditional enterprise software vendor at heart. For the record, Yammer is a pure play cloud vendor and Jive offers cloud or on-premise options.

It will be interesting moving forward to see how VMware decides to use its social pieces and if it will continue to buy other companies.

For now, VMware is in a good position, leading the way for virtualization and cloud computing, while buying other pieces to fill in holes. And they are making money hand over fist along the way. It seems social is just a small piece in their ever-growing cloud-virtualization strategy and they want to be in it every which way they can.

Photo by FHKE on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Virtualization Lets You Work and Play Securely on One Phone

Ron Miller — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:35:03 +0000

One of the big challenges facing IT departments as we move forward is how they will incorporate safe and secure applications into a mobile environment. This week, LG and VMware announced a partnership that will enable users to have a personal and secure work environment on the same phone using virtualization.

For the first release, this will work on Android, but there’s nothing to stop VMware from developing this for additional phone operating systems as demand requires. Certainly from an enterprise perspective Windows would make sense since lots of companies remain Microsoft shops.

The way this works is IT creates a virtual work environment using VMware and installs it on each user’s phone. Instead of having to carry two separate phones–one for work and one for play–users can have the two phones on a single device.

The virtualized work environment is essentially a complex app that sits on the phone. When the user taps the work phone app, the phone switches into work with all of the work applications, contacts and so forth that are related to work.

When the user wants to return to their non-work phone, they tap back into their personal environment and their personal contacts, music, videos and other content are all there waiting for them. It’s the best of both worlds in a single phone.

It should please IT departments who can ensure that the work-related content and apps will not mix with whatever else the user is doing on the device and this should help bring some peace of mind to IT. Meanwhile end users should love having a single device that supports both their lives, yet keeps them separate and distinct.

As VMware sees it, this solves a fundamental support issue for IT departments who are faced with increasing demand from end users to let them use a wide array of mobile devices. While organizations increasingly recognize the value of providing access to corporate data on mobile devices, there are a host of security and governance problems associated with that.

By giving these shops the ability to build an isolated, secure environment; VMware is helping solve this fundamental enterprise mobile dilemma.

Meanwhile employees want to use the phones they want to use. While this is initially an LG-VMware Android phone initiative there is little reason that VMware couldn’t extend this to other handset makers across multiple operating systems. I could even see instances where different phone operating systems worked on the same device via virtualization . After all, I can run multiple operating systems on my Mac Book Pro, so why not potentially running multiple operating systems on my iPhone.

It’s an elegant idea that opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities for both consumer and enterprise users, and any solution that can combine work and play into a single phone is certainly well worth exploring. It should be interesting to see where this goes and if it catches on in a big way or not.

You can see a video of a dual virtualized phone in action on Engadget.