VMWorld and the Impact of Virtualization on Cloud
Myself and the crew recently attended VMWorld. 20,000 or so attendees, Bon Jovi, what's not to like. Oh, they also had powerful keynotes, significant product releases, and major licensing changes that show their commitment to cloud, customers and partners, particularly under the NIST definition. Most profound was my observation that the majority of attendees were core IT professionals. Not that I expect much different, as VMWare technology is deep in the data center, but it occurred to me that very few business people realize the impact of virtualization on our world, even less were AEC industry aware.
Why does any of this matter to AEC companies? Because many of them are struggling with Understanding cloud, developing a strategy, and delivering the benefits. Server virtualization has been the rush, and delivered without question. The problem is this is how far traditional IT takes it. They are still stuck in the infrastructure mindset vs. application. But virtualization in the broad sense, is critical to gaining efficiencies needed to deliver the broad range of applications required by AEC Companies. Beyond today's possibilities (primarily server virtualization) which assist in deployment of general line of business applications like project management and accounting software, future improvements in virtualization and related management tools will break down barriers for BIM and other intensive applications as well. It's also well positioned to improve on the essential cloud characteristic of broad access and general concept of identify based user management. This goes way beyond server virtualization, yet many have not even got their head around that.
Why does this matter overall? In terms of my career and company, we've been hooked on server virtualization since about 2007. We even had our rounds with desktop technologies like parallels and other windows virtual PC applications prior to that. We are committed to driving cloud standards and virtualization, especially when wrapped with the VMWare vision, provides a great platform to enables this. The vision of VMWare is open, and goes way beyond servers. They literally want to virtualize (abstract hardware) everything, resulting in the "Software Datacenter". I think it's critical that business people get a better understanding of Cloud and the impact of virtualization beyond servers. I'll work on some future posts to simplify and stress it's current and future importance.
For now, visit the VMWorld site and dig a bit.