Virtually unstoppable
Virtually unstoppable
May 01, 2005: VMware was originally founded in 1998 to bring mainframe-class virtual machine technology to industry-standard computers. Now an EMC company, VMware is still run as an independent concern and has become synonymous with the shift towards virtual computing. Stuart Finlayson talks to Ed Bugnion, CTO and co-founder of VMware, who takes us through VMware's journey, from the brainchild of five university students to the primary reference point for virtualisation technology innovation in the industry today
With virtualisation in both the server and storage environments at the core of many of the IT industry's leading protagonists' strategies right now, Ed Bugnion (pronounced Boon-yawn) should feel pretty satisfied with himself at present, having played a significant role in creating the company whose innovations in the last few years have really catapulted virtualisation technology to the prominence it enjoys in today's marketplace.
"We have played a huge part in making virtualisation centre stage. If you look back to as recently as two years ago everyone was talking about on-demand computing, adaptive enterprise computing and utility computing. These were strategies that were relatively ill-defined umbrella strategies including a collection of independent technology roadmaps. Today, people talk about virtualisation as it is a much more concrete approach. We are the leader in the virtualisation space and we have certainly seen the benefits of the focused interest on virtualisation," ventures Bugnion.
VMware was formed in January 1998. Bugnion was one of the five founders, all of whom hailed from California's Stanford University. Fellow founder-and inaugural president-Diane Greene, remains president of VMware to this day, which now operates as an independent subsidiary of EMC.
"We had done some prior research at Stanford University on using mixed multiprocessors, and the research led to the design of a system that used virtual machines," recalls Bugnion.
After their work started to generate a considerable amount of interest, Bugnion and the rest of the team then started to examine whether or not there was a commercial opportunity.
"We realised that if we used the virtual machine approach on Intel-based systems, that we might actually be able to build a company out of it."
So they started the company in January 1998 with this goal in mind. Although they all had a separate background at Stanford, they unanimously decided to first develop a workstation product in order to-as Bugnion recollects-"iron out the technology, mature it and get early revenues."
In May 1999, VMware launched its first commercial product, VMware Workstation Linux Host 1.0. The company then grew its revenues steadily quarter over quarter, before launching the first of its server products (GSX and ESX Server) in 2001. In 2003, the VirtualCentre and VMotion technology was launched. 2004 then saw the introduction of VMware ACE for enterprise desktops.
It was in January 2004 that the acquisition by EMC was completed, but as Bugnion explains, the deal has had little impact on the way VMware goes about its business."We are being operated by EMC as an independent subsidiary, with the VMware management in charge of the management of the subsidiary. Being an independent subsidiary means we are not integrating sales forces."
According to Bugnion, the acquisition has been very successful for both sides."From the VMware perspective, it has allowed us to increase our growth. Firstly, it has effectively taken off the table what had become the number one pre-sales objection from our customers which was a concern over making a strategic investment in technology that was delivered by a privately held company. Secondly, EMC has allowed us to increase our investment in research and development, as well as in sales and marketing, and we've been on a very aggressive hiring growth. Thirdly, EMC has a privileged relationship with a large number of customers at a high level which has given us additional visibility at the executive level."
Virtual mindset
Virtualisation has come to the fore to such an extent that Bugnion says most of the customers that he talks to have either established a clear virtualisation strategy for their IT infrastructure or know that they need to have one.
The argument that having a virtualisation strategy is something of a necessity has also been backed up to a degree by Gartner, which recently said that companies that do not have a virtualisation strategy will be at a competitive disadvantage within a couple of years.
All this has facilitated VMware's rapid ascension to become one of the tech industry's biggest success stories in recent times.
"It has become an easy sell as customers understand the importance of it and understand the pain points. They can see the value of the products as the return on investment can easily be quantified-it is often measured in weeks. Also, it doesn't require a radical change of their methodologies and processes; specifically we are interoperable with existing software stacks so the technology can be deployed relatively quickly."
The growing interest in VMware's technology was in evidence at the company's first user conference, which took place recently in San Diego. Over 1600 customers were there for the two day event, together with 250 reseller partners. Around 30 sponsors were also there to demonstrate interoperability between their technology stacks and VMware's. "It was a great event," enthuses Bugnion, "and the level of attention we got for that event is certainly an indication of the momentum that virtualisation has at the moment and the focus that people have on it."
The next step
As for the evolution of virtualisation, Bugnion sees it as a three step process, with the three steps happening in parallel but solving different parts of the problem at different levels.
"Firstly, virtualisation needs to be a distributed strategy. It's not about breaking up a single server into smaller chunks. It's about pooling resources that are coming from different servers, different storage subsystems and different networks into a uniform pool of hardware resources that collectively can run a very large collection of virtual machines, which are the logical entities that run the data centre.
"The second layer is a mechanism by which you can manage the logical components, and that requires the ability to group hierarchically virtual machines, so there needs to be some support for aggregation.
"Finally, you need to have an automation framework. You want to minimise human intervention as much as possible. Particularly, you want to have an automation framework that can orchestrate related technologies that are interoperating in the data centre."
Community spirit
Another contributing factor in the momentum of virtualisation technology is VMware's recently launched online VMware Community. Bugnion underlines how it came about, as well as its purpose.
"The community is a reflection of our focus on our customers. We launched the community as an online resource where members can contribute content and experiences and VMware staff can augment it with their perspective and contributions. It's also a forum in which a number of VMware user groups from various geographical locations are represented, allowing them to exchange ideas. The importance of the community is because we want to make virtualisation a standard IT practice, we want our customers to share their experiences and their practices so that we can improve our products, establish best practices, and in general, standaridise virtualisation as a standard IT practice."
Tech-savvy locals
Having had the opportunity to assess the local market at close quarters during his recent visit, Bugnion observed: "The Australian and New Zealand market is a technical market where people appreciate technology and deploy technology that adds value, is robust, reliable and proven and demonstrated ROI. One way to characterise the market is that it is one that tracks the US market, but the lag time is pretty short. It's hard to quantify [the length of the lag time] but we think it will track the growth and momentum we are seeing in the United States."
So what of the future of VMware? While it may be operating as an independent entity within the EMC machine, surely the company's strategy will converge with EMC's in the not too distant future.
"EMC has a storage virtualisation strategy which is an independent technology and is not tied to VMware's strategy," says Bugnion. "We obviously have a server virtualisation strategy as well as a desktop virtualisation strategy. The value proposition behind virtualisation is to be able to separate the measure of the logical components-whether it is your data in the case of storage, or your applications and operating systems in the case of servers-from the physical infrastructure that they run on top of.
"There is a synergy in having in-synched convergence between those two and that convergence is inevitable. EMC's strategy is to have these various products and technologies that develop independently; obviously they are interoperable [with each other] but also interoperable with competing technologies."
Neither has VMware's acquisition by EMC had a negative impact on VMware's working relationships with some of EMC's biggest rivals. Indeed, according to Bugnion, the situation is quite the contrary.
"Actually, our relationships with IBM, HP and others have improved and strengthened since the acquisition. We have very deep relationships with the server arms of IBM and HP. These relationships include not only certification but also support and distribution, so it's a revenue generating opportunity for our partners and those relationships have strengthened in line with our overall momentum in revenue. We have also maintained good relations with the storage divisions of these companies and that's basically been driven in large part by the customers who want us to work together, as well as the commitments by both the storage divisions and VMware to keep working together.
VMware's strategy is to remain an open platform. We are storage agnostic. We are also operating system and application agnostic. Being agnostic at these various levels doesn't mean you don't care-what it means is you have to make your best effort to provide the best value to your customers and work and build partnerships to strengthen the interoperability at these various levels."
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