The Hub Commentary __
New technology that removes hardware and thus tangible cost savings is always a short term win. Managing it long term is generally the afterthought. Not that I’m against the virtualization and more efficient use of hardware resources, I’m for it. I am encouraging of planning for the upfront service enablement of it with proper management, however.
Management technologies will be the secondary market, more specifically the integration platform and strategy that brings an end-to-end view of the physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure delivering services. Many articles are about IT organizations seeing virtualization and cloud as a problem where I see it as just another technology to embrace, deploy and and manage.
Client virtualization is an even more complex environment that will dictate integration, management and the end-to-end visibility of the infrastucture. The cost savings are great and with a bit of planning to implement the right visibility, those savings can be realized without pain. Remember the customer calls in because they cannot access something or something is slow, they have no idea how they connect, what runs where, that their desktop image is really a virtual machine running on some server, etc. The job of the service desk to pinpoint and restore service is impossible without the proper visibility. So thus, management/integration platforms will become the secondary market of the virtualization explosion.
Regarding the midmarket, I find this curious as they have minimal IT staff and have been in the cloud far longer than most. Remember the Intuit crash last summer (2010) for several days, that was all about the Quick Books subscribers in the midmarket. Enterprise organizations could take a queue from the midmarket on embracing the cloud and virtualization.
2011 is going to be an interesting year for us in the data center without a doubt!
Michele
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The new year is starting off well for VMware, which saw its stock jump to a new 52-week high of $94.19 Monday. It then dipped a bit to close at $92.97, which is approximately 4.6 percent higher than its previous closing price, Investors.com reported.
