VMWare's recent product announcements appear to focus the company on becoming what the New York Times calls "the Microsoft of Cloud computing." Already virtualization's 800-pund gorilla, VMWare's unveiled its vSphere 5, plus a “cloud infrastructure suite” to handle security, data recovery and automated deployment of cloud processing and storage. CEO Paul Maritz compared the move to Microsoft's introduction of Office back in the '90s. As to the suggestion that VMWare is also trying to lock in customers to its environment, Maritz says companies want their cloud infrastructure to "just work." He allows that mobility is important, and of course says VMWare has the solution: Cloud Foundry, its hosted and managed service which is developing open source tools for portability. “You don’t want these clouds to become the modern equivalent of the mainframe,” he said. The Times's Steve Lohr isn't buying it. "Software platforms are software platforms," he says. "When they are owned or controlled by a single company, history suggests that stickiness, not portability, is the priority." Source: The New York Times
VMWare's recent product announcements appear to focus the company on becoming what the New York Times calls "the Microsoft of Cloud computing." Already virtualization's 800-pund gorilla, VMWare's unveiled its vSphere 5, plus a “cloud infrastructure suite” to handle security, data recovery and automated deployment of cloud processing and storage. CEO Paul Maritz compared the move to Microsoft's introduction of Office back in the '90s. As to the suggestion that VMWare is also trying to lock in customers to its environment, Maritz says companies want their cloud infrastructure to "just work." He allows that mobility is important, and of course says VMWare has the solution: Cloud Foundry, its hosted and managed service which is developing open source tools for portability. “You don’t want these clouds to become the modern equivalent of the mainframe,” he said. The Times's Steve Lohr isn't buying it. "Software platforms are software platforms," he says. "When they are owned or controlled by a single company, history suggests that stickiness, not portability, is the priority." Source: The New York Times