We had the opportunity to catch up with the VMWare End-User-Computing (EUC) management team at their analyst meeting in Boston. Very good meeting and great chance to feel the pulse of the EUC products.
Here are my top 3 takeaways
- What a difference a year makes – A year ago some pundits were seeing the end of the ‘other’ portfolio investments VMWare had done beyond core virtualization, with dis-investitures looming overall and some of them even happening. But change starts with people and with installing Sanjay Poonen, the dynamics changed for the better: With two rapid acquisitions (Desktone and AirWatch), getting top talent from the competition (Shultz and Dhawan from Citrix) – both the team in charge and its product capabilities look much better than a year ago. The vision where the team wants to take the portfolio is compelling and with shipping its DaaS offering before Amazon (where WorkSpaces is still in limited availability) it had a significant early win.
- Compelling vision – but work remains – VMware’s executives described a comprehensive and compelling vision where they want to take the EUC portfolio. The recent acquisitions have already lead to a directional harmonization in little time, but we found the AirWatch direction particularly compelling. On the technical side, the new EUC division CTO Colbert showed a significant abstraction architecture that looked complete with all moving pieces nicely tucking in. Needless to write it will be significant work to make it real.
- DaaS needs data centers – It was good to see the management team acknowledging that desktop business is a cost business. Since we know, and for all of the foreseeable future – costs for operating end user devices are coming down. Vendors with the more cost effective infrastructure will be better positioned. And EUC products brings a stable and pretty predictable load to infrastructure build out plans – which ultimately materializes in data centers. And here not only the EUC future – but the overall VMware strategy is of concern, which (so far) has only shown a remarkably slow pace (even though VMware just announcedtheir first data center outside of the US – in the UK).
In general DaaS products are interesting from two angles: For one they are a key driver for data center load, solve a perennial IT problem and it looks like network availability and bandwidth issues of the past can be overcome now. For the other they are key to change the way how people work and interact with their devices. Having your desktop with you all the time, cross device and ideally with the option of state full transfer coupled with desirable data synchronization - is a very powerful technology that will enable new business practices.
MyPOV
Good progress by VMware on EUC, an energized team is in place, early success has happened and now it’s time for the real integration and product work to start. More acquisitions are more likely than not and the EUC team has to come up with an adaptive and accommodating architecture. And while the hybrid delivery capability has its merit, and VMware’s huge partner network is an asset, both split overall compute load. And there VMware - beyond EUC – needs to make its plans clear – better sooner than later.
