"We are trying to keep the licensing stable for as long as we can, but in 10 years from now, things will have changed quite radically. We are going to have to move towards more of a consumption-based model. This is where we are going.”
That was the prediction from VMware CEO Paul Maritz last week at the VMworld conference in Copenhagen. It’s a reflection of the changing ICT landscape that such predictions are being made, he explained:
“ We are moving to a world where infrastructure is becoming the new hardware. We need to take that seriously…We've been through the mainframe era and the client-server era, and now with the Cloud era, we're seeing the next phase of interaction with consumer technology starting to dominate the enterprise.” ”
The critical thing for that consumer technology savvy audience is that the Cloudjust has to work, warned Maritz:
“People are going to want to go to CloudComputing because at some point in the stack they just want it to work. Automating it so people can see it as a utility [so that they can spend more time on business critical computing] - that's the technical challenge. Making things simple is always hard. There is still a lot of work to be done before we say we have reached high automation. ”
There must be a danger though that Cloud in fact takes the industry back to highly proprietary stacks provided by a few dominant providers? Maritz disagrees:
“Anyone who tells you that all the world’s computing will be handled out of one or two or three uber-clouds – that [should be] treated with a certain amount of scepticism. The reality is we are going to go into a multi-Cloud world, where people will have different clouds for regulatory reasons. We believe that in fact [in a] multi-Cloud world and we need to be thinking about how we make that easier, not more difficult, for customers At a lower level, we believe infrastructure will become more automated, standardised and more consumed as a service. We think we will get a fair share of that business, but we won’t be the only players there.” ”
Integration will play a large part in VMware’s offerings, he said:
“ We will have three offerings – an integrated infrastructure offering that at a new application level you can do across the stack that will be open, but then we will draw a line under that openness by making it an open source project with an Apache 2 license. ”
But in the end, it’s all about change, he added:
“ The Cloud is having an impact on architectures, and you see it driving a lot of new approaches in memory architecture, storage etc, and what we are seeing is a lot of the approaches being pioneered in large consumer Clouds are now coming back into the enterprise environment. The consumer world is having a much bigger influence on the enterprise environment then the other way around at the moment. ”
