As there are many conferences on Moscone, and most use Moscone South as exhibition floor, you can easily compare the profile of the show floor. And pretty much all conferences have a ‘Matterhorn’ profile – with the vendor in the middle, surrounded by the premium sponsors being the peak – and then quickly flattening down. VMworld however looks more like the Ayers Rock – only smaller booth on the very sides of the show floor. An impressive testament how important the industry thinks VMware and its customers are.
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| No Matterhorn - more an Ayers Rock profile |
So my takeaways from VMworld are here and here – and I shared my briefings of VMworld 2013 here – so this post will follow the same format - vendors in alphabetical format:
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I met with CloudPhysics last year and the startup has made very good progress in the last 12 months. Originally the company focused on the visualization of VMware data centers compute loads and with a smart crowdsourcing strategy of intelligence snippets (they call them cards) quickly got a lot of attention and traction. More recently the company has added monitoring and analytics and with that has become an even more interesting vendor to consider.
The vendor formerly known as Cloudvelocity has also made good progress in the last year in the interesting area of cloud migration. The original focus was on cloud migration, it is good to see the company is now quickly moving into the disaster recovery opportunity. The product ‘just’ transfers files between the private to the public cloud (for now AWS) and that simply works. Sounds magical, but given the experience of the founder team from the former Neopath – something of that complexity could have been pulled off – and now we can see it has been pulled off. No better proof point than live customers, that the company now has. Always nice to see a startup putting a year to good news.
This startup took the interesting approach to enable monitoring of on premise data centers from a cloud based console. At VMworld it promoted its products with the catchy slogan of 'SaaS magic for Private Clouds'. To help with that Platform9 has created its own OpenStack distribution. An interesting approach to run a cloud based console easily and quickly on top of OpenStack based data centers. Definitively an interesting alternative of the traditional, slow to procure and install, hard to maintain system management and monitoring vendor landscape.
It was great to catch up with Puppetlabs, to me the company that powers most infrastructure for next generation applications. It was good to see the focus on being a software company, staying away from the services fray and leaving that business to the partner ecosystem. With the user conference PuppetConf imminent – I can’t share any product plans, but they sounded promising. One of the viable showcases on how to thrive in the Open Source ecosystem not with services, but software products.
An interesting startup in the virtual desktop and virtualization space. Contrary to most VDI products that sit on hypervisors, Sphere3D has built its on microvisor. With that the company achieves significant better utilization of hardware than the VM based competitors – but with the vendor also requires its own virtualization. The good news is that the virtualization process is simple, only a few steps and can be done by a business end user, with the requirement being only that they are able to install the application. With the pending merger with Overland Storage the company will likely become a player in the mobile / BYOD market, too.
There are few Midwest based software companies and more than often we have not heard of them. TeamQuest is in the workload measurement and visualization business and has an impressive customer portfolio, having been around for 20+ years. The product allows also to import and visualize 3rd party data and has recently added predictive analytics to help foresee short comes and possible outages in a data center. When predictive analytics are put in place successfully, and the vendor has the domain expertise to pull this off, they are a very powerful mechanism to make people's life easier - in this case the life of IT managers and operators.
My 2013 VMworld speed briefing blog post can be found here.
More on VMWare by me
- Event Report - VMware makes a lot of progress - but the holy grail is still missing - read here.
- First Take - VMware's VMworld Day 1 Keynote - Top 3 Takeaways - read here.
- Progress Report - Good start for VMware EUC - time for 2nd inning - read here.
- Speed Briefings at VMworld - inside and outside the VMware ecosystem - read here.
- VMware defies conventional destiny - SDDC to the rescue - read here.
