Time after time when I’m talking to customers and partners I’m hearing and getting told that what they’re wanting is to avoid being ‘Locked In’ to any particular platform, and a fear that building platform after platform will just lead to the same kind of sprawl that they were challenge with previously with ‘Server Sprawl’
At the same time however, what customers are looking for is operational efficiency, simplicity and efficiency in how they run their operations. Ultimately this creates a challenge as those are all things that one would expect to get from something engineered as a platform/product as opposed to something that one would build themselves.
People have different ways to describe what they are looking for. “A single hypervisor platform”, “data consolidation”, “platform consolidation” but they really all mean the same thing, it’s someone senior saying ‘Just give me ONE platform on which to run all my workloads’. AKA One platform to #RunAllTheThings
I quickly realised that what we needed was a different way of telling the story that was often broken down into a ‘Cloud’ strategy, or an ‘On Prem’ strategy – more and more we’re seeing people wanting to talk about ‘Hybrid Cloud’ and what that might mean, but all this is going to be for nothing and lead to the same management chaos unless we find a better way to manage it all.
The VMware approach has always been built on choice, VMware ‘won’ the Hypervisor-wars as a result of being the enabler of choice. Underneath the VMware layer this was all about choice of Servers – being certified on the most server platforms was a route to success for VMware. Likewise, above the VMware layer the focus was on choice of Operating Systems.
I can still remember Diane Green, VMware’s first CEO standing on stage at VMworld’s with two huge numbers on screen. One the number of servers certified to run vSphere, and the other the number of operating systems that were certified to run on vSphere – this was all about maximising choice.
As we went forward that focus moved away from the servers under us and the Operating Systems above us and started to focus more on Clouds under us (public cloud, partners AND private cloud) and the Platform that sit above us – be those Kubernetes Platforms, Application Platforms or even legacy platforms. If we are going to talk about Hybrid Cloud and Multiple Clouds, we also need to embrace multiple platforms – and the opportunity for VMware is to be that One Platform to #RunAllTheThings.
Update – see an early presentation of this here …