Get over the desktop PC - it's a dead metaphor for how people work in the 21st century, reckons VMware CEO Paul Martitz.
Within five years, less than 20 percent of computing clients will be running Microsoft Windows, predicted the man who once propped up Microsoft's Windows empire as head of its Platforms division:
“What we’re seeing in the Cloud era is not just hundreds of millions but billions of new users and devices now coming into play. Three years ago over 95 percent of the devices connected to the Internet were personal computers. Three years from now that number will probably be less than 20 percent. More than 80 percent of the devices connected to the Internet will not be Windows-based personal computers.”
This has significant implications for ICT buyers and users:
“PCs are not the only animal in the zoo anymore. Increasingly, users are holding other devices in their hands…[data] can no longer belong to any one device, or any one operating system. So we have to float away from that aspect of the desktop…I spent my whole life working on the PC…The problem is the people under the age of 35 don't sit behind desks, and they don't spend all of their time lovingly tending to documents. They will be dealing with streams of information that will be coming at them in much smaller chunks and much larger numbers. We're moving into a new post-document era, and we will need different solutions.”
That will mean listening to what users say they want from their devices and what devices they want to use:
“Users are expecting to see that information on a much broader class of devices and in different ways. We are no longer going to be able to depend upon the fact that IT can control the device in a user’s hands. The device in the user’s hands is going to be fundamentally determined by what happens in the consumer world, and we’re going have to learn how to deliver capability to users independent of the particular device that they happen to have in their hands at that time of day, and do that in a way that’s not only secure on the one hand, but acceptable to the user in the other. They’re not going to put up with strange effects of basically having legacy paradigms sitting on these devices.”
In a keynote address to the 19,000 attendees at the VMware conference in Las Vegas, Maritz urged customers to move on from virtualization to a full-fledged Cloud infrastructure in order to accommodate the needs of a more dynamic workforce which demands the delivery of relevant and applications:
“ We’re going to have to see new techniques and new approaches introduced into the world of IT. We’re going to see very important new ways of presenting and developing applications. HTML5 promises to be very, very important, because it could be a genuinely capable cross-device way of writing applications. We’re already seeing the influence of new programming frameworks. … We’re seeing new ways of deploying applications as a service whether it be infrastructure as a service or platform as a service.”
This in turn is going to demand new approaches to storing and managing data:
“The relational database cannot handle the scale at which and the rate at which these applications are going to need to be developed. And of this you’re already going to see the beginnings of the next canonical set of applications that will be about scale and being real-time. It’s no longer going to be sufficient to be able to collect data, put it in a giant warehouse, let it lie fallow there and then run a report over it to find out what happened last month or the month before that. People are going to have to be able to react to information coming in in real time. If you’re going to service the Facebook generation the way that they want to see information, you’re going to have to be able to give them customised information in the context they want to see it in real time.”
Offering such as VMware's Cloud Foundry PaaS are designed for building Cloud apps, but virtualisation hasn't gone away just yet, added Maritz:
“Client server apps will be around for a while, and there's a need to slide functionality underneath them. Virtualization technology is a critical technology for doing that because it can be applied in a non-disruptive way…Cloud Foundry is about how Cloud applications will be written in the future. It's open in terms of modern programming frameworks it will support. We think the majority of next generation apps will be written by people under the age of 35.”
tags for VMworld: move on from PCs - and virtualisation?
