VMware's Cloud Strategy Matures, Focuses on OpenStack

VMware is much in the news this week for its announcements on the cloud computing front. In a blog post, the company announced the launch of VMware Integrated OpenStack, which, notably, is available for use, free of charge, with VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus, vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus and all editions of vCloud Suite. The company is also pushing its vision of "one cloud, any app, any device."

Shrewdly VMware is steadily moving away from eschewing open source platforms, and embracing them instead, especially with OpenStack. 

All the way back in 2008, I wrote a post about VMware's perilous stance toward open source.  That post noted this:

"VMware is not a one-product company, but its huge market capitalization was largely built on efforts in one arena: virtualization. Unfortunately, that red hot technology is increasingly being encroached on by open source offerings, and it is always a precarious proposition for tech companies to depend on one product category as heavily as VMware has. Just ask the former employees of Netscape or Lotus about that."

Fast-forward to today, and VMware has a much more holistic stance toward open source and its product line. "Our goal with VMware Integrated OpenStack has been to make our customers successful with OpenStack," says this week's blog post. "We wanted to help them leverage their existing VMware investments and expertise to confidently deliver production-grade OpenStack, backed by a unified support from VMware. With VMware Integrated OpenStack we deliver a solution that maximizes a customer’s chances for success. We focused our effort on simplicity and ease of use, or as we love to say it, you don’t need an OpenStack PhD with VMware Integrated OpenStack."

Production support for VMware Integrated OpenStack, which also includes supporting the open source code, is optional and can be purchased separately at $200/CPU (minimum 50 CPU). The company has also noted that pre-defined workflows automate common OpenStack operations such as adding/removing capacity, configuration changes, patching and upgrading.

The best news for VMware is that cloud computing is growing in tandem with virtualization. With its own OpenStack offering, VMware can approach organizations interested in both types of platforms with an integrated solution.