During a recent trip to the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California, I sat down for an interview with Bogomil Balkansky, VMware's vice president of product marketing. Our discussion covered the arrival of vSphere 4, VMware's market share in the SMB market, and what VMware's long-term strategy is for positioning their products against Microsoft's virtualization portfolio.
Jeff James: How much have you relied on your larger customers for feedback on product improvement [for vSphere]? Where does the inspiration for new product features come from--is it entirely driven by customer feedback, or is it based on the approach you want to take?
Bogomil Balkansky: It actually comes from two different directions, and we have a very interesting, very unique model of product development where on one hand, we do sort of the classical thing that most software companies do where we have a very structured process that is customer-driven--stay close to customers and track how they're using the software, generate ideas, and get customer feedback for how to improve things. So again, we have a very structured methodology. We have a customer advisory council, user groups, and multiple ways to source that feedback. And it gets filtered through and prioritized by product management, and then gets fed into our product development plan.
In parallel with that, we also have an engineering innovation track, where we give a free license, if you want, to engineers. There is time and it is encouraged for them to experiment with cool new things. Even if you don't know if there's any commercial applicability of something, like a crazy new idea.
Jeff James: That's similar to what Google does.
Bogomil Balkansky: Sort of. My understanding with Google is that it's very structured: 20 percent of your time. Here it's not really mandated to 20 percent of the time you have to do this, but it's very much encouraged and rewarded. Usually twice a year we have these big innovation fairs with R&D where engineers do demos of prototypes, or present the cool new stuff that they think they can get done. So that's the other major source of innovation. The two meet in the middle--here's what customers want, and here's the super cool new stuff that we think we can do that customers didn't know they wanted because they didn't know it was possible.
If you think about it, a lot of true, groundbreaking innovation wasn't really based on customer demand, I mean it was based on customer demand, but if you think about the cell phone, it wasn't invented by doing focus groups. Would customers love to do it? Yes. But if you went around doing focus groups for fixed phone service, you probably wouldn't have come up with the idea of wireless. That's not how it happened.
So sourcing ideas from these two fronts, they meet in the middle. And again, that's part of our product development process. Before we create a plan of record, we take ideas from both sides, prioritize them, and say "Hey, this is what we're going to do."
Jeff James: One of the new vSphere 4 features discussed during the announcement event was the new host profiles feature, which is aimed at helping enterprises that are managing large numbers of virtual machines. Maybe you can talk a about some of the other top 2-3 vSphere features that were requested by customers? And what is your own favorite feature of vSphere 4?
Bogomil Balkansky: I think one that has a lot of popularity with customers, for the same reason why host profiles are attractive, is the vNetwork Distributed Switch, which is this feature that we have enabled in our platform and Cisco has built a product to actually instantiate it. With the Distributed Switch, we have the ability to create or configure the virtual networking once for an entire cluster of servers. So instead of configuring a virtual switch on every host one-by-one, and again when you have a hundred hosts it gets cumbersome. It's a similar idea in many ways conceptually to host profiles. With host profiles you create one golden template, and you blast it out through every single host. With vNetwork Distributed Switch you take a whole cluster of servers, and in essence you configure the virtual networking once across the entire cluster, similarly very important to be able to manage that scale.
As we're getting into cloud computing, one of the paradigm shifts that is required is can you actually manage an environment of that scale. Instead of managing onesies and twosies, can you manage hundreds, thousands. So, both host profiles and Distributed Switch are the kind of features you need to have high-level management and scalable management.
Now, in terms of my personal favorites, I think fault tolerance is going to have a significant impact on the market, not only because technologically it's way cool. But you think about the amount of time and money that has been associated with providing that level of availability before--we're decreasing the cost and complexity of providing that level of sophistication of high availability by orders of magnitude. And I can't tell you exactly how many specifically, but I know it's multiple orders of magnitude. When you so dramatically change the economics of something, you tend to drive very interesting dynamics in terms of demand. So, think about the ingenious invention of Henry Ford's: he made cars much cheaper than before, wow, then kept expanding them out multiple times. And what we're doing with fault tolerance is that we can make that expansive capability so cheap, relatively, and so easy to use, so like in the demo today, virtually it's right click, turn of fault tolerance, click yes, and it's done.
I think people will really think differently in terms of what are the kinds of applications that actually deserve that level of application, because in the past it's been so difficult and so expensive that it's really reserved for the 0.1 percent of really important stuff. And there's a lot of disruption and downtime cost for less important stuff, but again a lot of people running around with nothing to do because the system is down, doesn't work. I mean, what do you do? "The network is down, let's go home." That's what people do.
So I think we'll see a significant expansion in terms of the number of applications or the kinds of applications that can really benefit from that level of availability.
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