You may have noticed that VMware has been pretty quiet (actually silent) during the Cisco, EMC, VMware announcement over the last few days. A few have even commented to me that Paul Maritz, VMware’s CEO looked uncomfortable during the live video cast with Joe Tucci and John Chambers. What’s at risk for VMware?

• The obvious risk is that VMware’s partner ecosystem may unwind. This is the highest profile announcement that VMware has made to date with some pretty big players. VMware actually does a very good job juggling the partner ecosystem, but that has primarily been because the partners have all had sales and marketing campaigns around VMware and it helps them drive revenue. HP, IBM, and Dell are VMware’s largest consumers and they aren’t exactly thrilled about VMware being up on stage with Cisco and EMC. If I worked at one of those firms I would continue business as normal, launch campaigns around my respective “pod”/ integrated solutions and dial up Mark Templeton, CEO at Citrix and Bob Muglia, President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft.
• What’s the trigger point for mature VMware adopters to jump off the server, network and storage gear they just purchased to support their virtualization deployments and jump onto the Vblock? VMware likes the Vblock concept because, in theory, it helps accelerate the deployment of mission critical applications, sells more licenses, and moves more and more x86 workloads to the vSphere platform. If they are counting on EMC and Cisco’s sales and field teams, it is going to take some time to train, incentivize, and get them to the point where they can sell virtualization as a strategy (notice I did NOT say “as a technology”).
• Isn’t the whole value of virtualization that it leverages commodity components? A Vblock is the furthest thing from a commodity. It actually uses 2 EMC Symmetrix V-Max devices. VMware needs to help customers understand the balance between paying a premium for an integrated stack like the Vblock or leveraging commodity servers and storage – and why you would choose one over the other.

So if VMware is ask risk, what is the opportunity for Citrix and Microsoft? I’ll pull that blog entry together later today.

Related posts:

1. Cisco, EMC and VMware Round Up
2. Cisco, EMC, and VMware… Acadia?
3. Acadia, Cisco, EMC, VMware: Vblock Top Three Questions
4. VMware’s Desktop Virtualization Health Care Market at Risk
5. ESG Analysis of Cisco, EMC, VMware, Acadia

Tags: Acadia, Bob Muglia, Cisco, Citrix, cloud computing, EMC, Mark Templeton, Microsoft, private cloud, Vblock, VMware, vSphere