Yesterday I attended VMware’s Virtualization Forum 2009 held at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour. Virtualization in its various forms has been a hot topic for years and looking at the growth of this event in terms of the number of attendees, is probably an independent verification of the interest in virtualization in the market with real users. Even in these tough economic times.
In his keynote address, Paul Harapin, Vice President VMware Australia and New Zealand, commented that this was the fourth annual event of the Virtualization Forum, which began with just 350 attendees a few years ago. This year’s event attracted 2,500 attendees. This may not be a big number by international standards, but Mr. Harapin noted that by VMware’s measurements, virtualization penetration in Australia is higher than any other country. Other high-adopters are Holland and Israel. This doesn’t come as a great surprise because Australia has had a history of adopting new technologies. In the 80s for example, Australia had a high market penetration of what was then a hot new technology, the fax machine. In fact, probably because of this predisposition for all things new, Australia has a reputation as a test market for many companies where they will trial new products and/or packaging, before rolling them out around the world.
Carl Eschenbach, EVP of Worldwide Field Operations was the second keynote speaker and he took the audience through VMware’s product portfolios and directions for the company. VMware claims around 150,000 VMware customers globally and although initially, the motivation for adopting virtualization is often to save costs, according to Mr. Eschenbach he is being told by CFOs that greater business agility is the key motivator, especially at the big end of town.
It wouldn’t have been an event on Virtualization without “Cloud” being mentioned and so the audience wasn’t disappointed. In fact, Cloud Bingo was alive and well on the Twitter feeds. (#vForum #vForumAust & vForum). Having said that I don’t think VMware overplayed its hand with Cloud for the event, given the hype out there, it has to be addressed in such a forum.
VMware’s definition of Cloud is very broad, being simply “Deliver IT as a Service”. In a subsequent discussion with Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO at VMware, he pointed to a VMware survey that found 15% or respondents had adopted Cloud in some form and 26% were evaluating. Although, it wasn’t clear what ‘adopting Cloud in some form’, means exactly.
Beyond Cloud a clear message from the event was that VMware is getting involved up and down the stack in middleware and now applications, with its recent acquisition of SpringSource. In fact, VMware appears to have interests everywhere except for the hardware and operating system layers. Mr. Herrod was quite clear however, that it is VMware’s intention to stay away from the operating system and for VMware to add value virtualizing elsewhere.
The event saw a strong push to message Desktop Virtualization and Mr. Eschenbach’s believes that 2010 is the tipping point for desktop virtualization. This is because in his opinion many factors are coming together, such as the increased interest in virtualization generally and the expected Windows 7 inspired desktop refresh. I would add to that the 3G telecommunications rollouts around the world means that mobile devices and applications give viable alternatives for users to still be productive when not at their virtualized PC and fixed line broadband connection.
The business justification is certainly there. If you think servers have low utilization, desktops generally have an even lower utilization. Because of this low relatively lower utilization, potential consolidation ratios for PCs are even higher than desktops. So, where you might be able to consolidate say 4 to 8 physical servers onto a virtual platform, the desktop consolidation ratio can be as high as 10 or 20 to 1. Desktop virtualization has always had what seemed good business cases, but for one reason or another it has never taken off in a big way.
I would be interested in your views on the future of Desktop Virtualization. Is this something you are now considering and why now? Or, do you still see impediments to the take up of this technology?
Beyond the keynotes, the Forum had an exhibition hall with around 60 vendors marketing their offerings including many well known brands and not so well known organizations. Feedback was generally positive and response in terms of the number of delegates shows that even in these difficult financial times, whether they are committed VMware users or novices interested in understanding more about moving into the world of virtualization, there is still interest from users where they perceive there is value to be had.
Did you attend the event? If so, what did you think of it? Let us know by posting a response to this blog.
Gary Burgess
Senior Vice President, Research & Operations
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