by
Colin Steele
SAN FRANCISCO -- At this morning’s VMworld keynote, VMware said it would focus more on SMBs, then spent a significant chunk of time demoing advanced products and technolgies, such as vCloud Director and software-defined networking. The disconnect was evident.
Tomorrow’s keynote will focus on end-user computing -- another area where the gap between vendorspeak and the reality of most IT departments is wide. VMware needs to close this gap if its emerging end-user products (Horizon Application Manager, Horizon Mobile, AppBlast and Octopus) are to succeed.
These products all take a forward-thinking approach: taking advantage of the consumerization of IT. Horizon and AppBlast give IT more options when it comes to deploying and delivering applications to endpoints, and Octopus is designed to be an IT-friendly alternative to cloud storage services such as Dropbox (or, to look at it another way, a user-friendly alternative to corporate file shares).
The problem is, a lot of IT pros still view consumerization as a trend that needs to be stopped, not taken advantage of. And even those that do see the benefits may have a hard time justifying the costs of these new products.
These are the two obstacles VMware needs to adress in tomorrow’s keynote. If CTO Steve Herrod and other execs can a) convince attendees that consumerization is good for business; and b) show that its benefits outweigh the costs of deploying these new products, VMware’s end-user computing strategy will have a nice little coming-out party for itself here at VMworld.
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