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VMware might be credited with popularizing enterprise virtualization, but to CEO Paul Maritz, that’s in his company’s past.
“If you want [a hypervisor] for free, we have one,” he said dismissively today at his company’s VMworld 2010 conference in San Francisco. It was something of a shot at rival Microsoft, which pegged its early efforts at making headway in the virtualization market on giving away its own Hyper-V hypervisor.
But the comment also signals VMware’s commitment to its new direction: away from the nuts and bolts of virtualization technology and into enabling a grander goal, what Maritz and company describe as “IT as a service.”
It’s an idea that recognizes that businesses’ IT organizations are taking on new strategic value as they work to provision, manage and secure applications and data in an increasingly complex cloud environment. ServerWatch takes a look at how VMware is positioning itself to equip businesses with the tools it says IT now needs.
SAN FRANCISCO — VMware CEO Paul Maritz had a clear message for anyone confused about what his company does. “We long ceased being a hypervisor company. If you want one for free, we have one. We make our money on data center automation,” Maritz said during a press Q&A following his keynote here at the company’s VMworld conference.
That broader vision of the role of virtualization in the enterprise and what VMware (NYSE: VMW) called IT as a Service, was a key theme addressed by Maritz and other VMware executives during the keynote session that also included several related new product announcements and an R&D effort called Project Horizon.
