New approach needed to capitalise on Cloud era: VMware

10.04.2012
Over 200 of VMware's partners have heard how the Cloud is as leading a change to computing that is as fundamental as that associated with the impact of mainframes.

They were attending the vendor's Partner Exchange 2012 event in Sydney to hear about the company's vision and goals.

VMware global strategic alliances vice-president, Parag Patel, said mainframes marked the first era of computing with a centralised IT model where users were not empowered.

"The PC/client server marked a fundamental shift, and the Cloud now promises another set of fundamental shifts in architecture, usage patterns, and IT approach," he said.

He also saw the shifting landscape being influenced by delivery architectures, devices, applications, and work style

"What business are now looking for is an architecture for ubiquitous service delivery, as they have had to contend with the traditional IT footprint that consisted of multiple operating environments that acted as pillars of isolation," Patel said.

The "new era footprint" is Cloud-centric, where one platform exists for every app and homogeneous management that allows for on-demand, as well as the ability to scale up and scale out, he said.

According to Patel, the architecture that allows VMware to provide ubiquitous service delivery is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Through IaaS, businesses are able to service catalogue and self service, policy-based automation and provisioning, and software defined storage, network, and security.

"An explosion of VMs requires new approach for automation, as well as resource optimisation and virtualisation, in the Cloud era," he said.

According to Patel, if a setup is script-based, manually built and managed, has hidden complexity, and change relies on individual expertise, the result will be cost and complexity.

However, by moving to a policy-based approach, cost and complexity can be reduced.

"The changing landscape of applications means that there are new modern frameworks and new application types to deal with, which has led to a shift from macro to micro," Patel said.

VMware sees the new model for this being "Platform-as-a-Service," which is based on an architecture that has ubiquitous service consumption in mind.

The "post-PC era" is also fuelling change at a rapid pace, as was pointed out with the fact that it took 21 years for PCs to go mainstream, while media tablets are expected to achieve the same in four years.

"This has led to a changing work style and a shift from a document-centric approach to work to collaboration-centric one," Patel said.

Patel sees VMware's role in accelerating the new era of IT coming down to helping to empower secure mobile workforce, enabling faster time to market for modern applications, and giving access to more flexible and scalable efficient infrastructure

VMware A/NZ vice-president and managing director, Duncan Bennet, spoke about the vendor's growth in the A/NZ market.

In 2011, VMware experienced a 37 per cent growth across A/NZ, with 97.5 per cent of all business done through partners in the region.

"Vmware's vision is paving a change in the A/NZ market and a strong foundation has been laid," Bennett said.

He also spoke about the key drivers for VMware, such as IT departments being concerned about losing control of their IT budgets, Cloud driving change despite lingering security concerns, the proliferation of mobile devices, and big data starting to overwhelm most companies.

"Cloud adoption is on the rise and the evolving market requires a new approach," he said.

"The world has changed and the CIO challenge of today comes down to freeing up resources to deliver the new experiences that customers demand."

Bennet said VMware's vision for 2012 is about customer and partner advocacy, diversification, supporting its people, and engagement and thought leadership.

As such, the vendor will be introducing a new system in 2012 to better support the field through simplified management of product licenses and support.