VMware is facing an uphill battle in driving vCloud Air’s adoption among enterprise customers. Launched with much fanfare in 2013 as vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS), the platform failed to take off. It’s quickly turning into a liability for VMware. The recent developments in the company clearly indicate that all is not well with the vCloud Air business.
The first sign came in the form of departures of vCloud Air’s top executives. Some of the well-known faces that championed VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy are no more with the company.
Ben Fathi, CTO at VMware left the company in August last year to join CloudFlare, a startup that deals with security and web application delivery. Ben was directly responsible for vCloud Air technology roadmap among other initiatives including software-defined-data-center (SDDC) and end-user computing (EUC). He held technical leadership positions at Cisco and Microsoft before joining VMware. Ben defined the initial containerization strategy for VMware which has now evolved into Photon Controller.
In October 2015, Mathew Lodge, VP of cloud services left VMware to take up the COO position at Weaveworks, a company that’s building the networking stack for containers. Mathew was the face of vCloud Air among customers and partners. He took the center stage at VMWorld to pitch VMware’s cloud to thousands of IT Pros and developers.
Last month, VMware lost its chief technologist and VP, Simone Brunozzi, who was hired from the rival, AWS. A popular personality in the cloud communities in Europe, Asia, and the valley, Simone was the rock star evangelist at AWS. He worked at the AWS regional headquarters in EMEA and APAC, engaging with the local ecosystem, and speaking at various conferences and events. Simone, who was quite active in the social media and the community, became relatively quiet after joining VMware. The company failed to take advantage of his brand and the following he had among the technical community. Simone has taken up the CTO role at a stealth startup in Silicon Valley.
Apart from the defections at the top, VMware faces another challenge with Virtustream, an enterprise cloud provider that EMC acquired last year. Virtustream enjoys credibility for running SAP workloads in the public cloud. There were initial plans and announcements to merge vCloud Air business with Virtustream, but the company backed out of it leaving EMC to manage Virtustream. This move created friction within the company as it has to deal with yet another competitor, which is ironically a part of the parent company.
While VMware is struggling to get its foothold in the hybrid cloud market, Microsoft is making great strides with Azure. Azure Stack, which Microsoft announced last week, delivers consistent experience between the private cloud and public cloud. Microsoft's strategy is to bring the best practices of the public cloud to the private cloud while VMware's attempt was to take the vCenter-based private cloud to the public cloud. Microsoft is confident that it will be able to push its hybrid cloud platform through Windows Server 2016, the next version of its flagship server operating system. Dell and HP Enterprise partnered with Microsoft to sell Cloud Platform System (CPS), the converged infrastructure appliance to enterprise customers. On the other hand, VMware failed to leverage its SDDC investments in driving customers to vCloud Air.
Amazon Web Services is turning into an unstoppable force in the cloud market. In the recent earnings statement, Amazon reported that AWS contributed to $687 million in operating income for the quarter, which is up from $240 million compared to last year. AWS is maintaining a huge lead in the market making it incredibly hard for the competition to catch up. VMware’s hybrid cloud lacks the breadth and depth of features supported by AWS. It’s partnership with Google to cross-sell Google Cloud Platform services hasn’t helped the company much.
vCloud Air’s debacle may not be all gloom and doom for VMware. The company has a healthy pipeline for its end user computing and SDDC business units. Like most of the traditional companies, VMware is struggling to define its relevance in the modern IT dominated by cloud. While public cloud is eroding its virtualization business, the rise of containers is challenging the very core of VMware – the hypervisor. The public cloud and containerization have dragged the company into the crossroads.
VMware is slowly realizing that building software to manage the data center is very different from managing the data center. Deploying massive infrastructure to host mission critical workloads of customers, and managing it not everyone's cup of tea. HP realised the same with the HP Helion Public Cloud platform. It’s time for VMware to go back to the whiteboard to redefine its priorities.
