It's been little more than a year since former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz replaced Diane Greene as the President and CEO of VMware, but Maritz has moved quickly to shake things up at the company. He bolstered VMware's formerly anemic partner efforts and streamlined its management structure. A steady procession of former Microsoft colleagues have joined Maritz at VMware, including Mark Lucovsky (who was part of the original Windows NT engineering team), COO Tod Nielsen (former vice president of Microsoft’s platform group), and EVP and Chief Development Officer Richard McAniff (former VP of Microsoft Office). Maritz also helped formulate a more coherent vision for the company that leverages VMware's strength in virtualization to create a commanding beachhead in the burgeoning cloud computing space.
Yet as successful as VMware has been over the last decade, it now faces more competitive pressure than ever. Microsoft continues to improve its virtualization offerings, with Windows Server 2008 R2 now offering a long-awaited Live Migration feature comparable to VMware's impressive vMotion technology. Oracle has acquired virtualization platform providers Virtual Iron and Sun Microsystems, and Citrix continues to improve its XenServer, XenApp, and XenDesktop products.
I interviewed Paul last year at VMworld 2008 and asked him how he planned to keep VMware one step ahead of Microsoft. Here's what he had to say:
"When you're competing with Microsoft, you have to do two things. One is you've got to shift your taillights somewhere they're not comfortable going. And then secondly, make no mistakes, and that's what we're trying to do."
To get an update on how VMware plans to keep the competition at bay, I recently sat down with Paul at the VMware campus in Palo Alto, CA, to get his thoughts about competing with Microsoft, the launch of vSphere 4.0, and what the future holds for virtualization in the enterprise.
Jeff James: How does the launch of vSphere 4.0 fit into the larger strategic vision of where you want to take VMware in the next few years?
Paul Maritz: Customers have this dilemma in that they want to get a fundamentally simpler, more efficient way of running IT. I've quoted some statistics that indicate 75 percent of some IT budgets goes to keeping the lights on, keeping the water flowing, and the rest of it. People are noticing that that's unsustainable in the long term, that increasingly boards of directors are asking harder and harder questions about that. Some of them open their papers on the airplane and read about all the cloud magic that is happening and they're coming back to their IT organizations and saying "Why are we stuck in the Dark Ages here? Why don't we just jump into the cloud and fire all you guys?"
Jeff James: There's a Dilbert comic strip that says the same thing: Dilbert's manager reads about virtualization, and then asks why the IT staff is taking so long to implement the technology.
Paul Maritz: Exactly, but now it's the cloud.
It's indicative of a real challenge here because existing IT cannot just jump into the cloud. They have existing applications that are never going to get rewritten; they have real security concerns, so the challenge for the whole industry is how do we provide cloud-like capabilities into the existing data in a digestible, evolutionary way? We think that virtualization, broadly defined, is the key to doing that. And I mean that, whether it comes from us or someone else. There is no other strategy that is going to cut through these tentacles of complexity and allow people to get out of the trap they are in right now and reach forward to a simpler, more efficient environment.
And to do that, you have to take a much broader view of what virtualization is. It has to become, essentially, this layer of software that truly hides all the complexity in the resource layers, whether those be hardware or software resources, and frees the application of having to know too much or being dependent upon anything else down there. So, why we chose to draw a line with vSphere, and say this is really a generation change going forward, is that it's not only doing more and better of what virtualization did in the past, in terms of scalability and performance, et cetera, but it really is about enabling a whole new set of functions to become virtual as well. And to really get this vision of the internal cloud to come about, anything that is tied to a physical device today has to be freed from that device. So whether it be a firewall, a router, a data scanning engine, or whatever—all those things that today are physical boxes have to transform into things that can essentially be attached to these applications and move around with the applications.
In that sense, this layer of what traditionally we'd call virtual infrastructure has become an operating system for the data center, or if you want to be more sexy, for the cloud. And really that is the vision that we can take our customers on: Here is a nondisruptive way of taking your existing applications and starting to get control of the complexity and get to fundamentally higher levels of efficiency, simplicity, and manageability.
As we hide a lot of the complexity, it also opens up the opportunity for people to essentially provision their infrastructure in different ways. Instead of buying it and running it themselves, they can rent it in the future. So part of this is working with the service provider community sites—the ultimate freedom is that not only will the way that you look at and run your applications be simply more efficient, but you'll actually have the opportunity to partially, or even completely down the road (but more likely partially), get out of the data center business.
Jeff James: How would you compare your approach to virtualization and cloud computing to what Microsoft has articulated as its strategy?
Paul Maritz: Well, we, more so than Microsoft, have worked very hard [to get to the point where] anything you put into this container we call a virtual machine can get full benefits, and you don't have to do any rewriting of the code. And that's harder to do—you have to really work hard at it—but that's the essence of who we are.
Jeff James: Several VMware executives have told me that VMware's long-term goal is to make accessing and using IT resources much more dynamic and fluid, possibly up to the point where allocating new IT resources could be as easy as plugging in a laptop: You don't know (or care) how the electricity is generated, but you know it's very easy to access. How far do you think we are from that?
Paul Maritz: To make something to be completely automatic—that is a nirvana that we are reaching toward. We think that we can take big steps along that road. We can take over, to a large extent, the job of managing the storage underneath. We've already taken over the job of managing the CPUs and memories. And part of the vSphere generation is a new set of management tools that let you manage at the application level, so we can do a lot of things automatically at that level. We think we'll take a big step down that road in 2009.
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