VMware acquires SocialCast - another steps towards competing with Office365

I mentioned in a previous blog post I believe VMware is building (rather acquiring) an Office365 competitive offering as they move from being an IaaS vendor to a PaaS and SaaS vendor. Today VMware announced their acquisition of SocialCast, an enterprise collaboration tool. SocialCast is offered as on premise, private cloud or SaaS.

I liken SocialCast to Office365's SharePoint offering, but with notable differences such as CRM and ERP integration. So in my mind here's where VMware is at today.

Outlook/Exchange = Zimbra
SharePoint = SocialCast
PowerPoint = SlideRocket
Word = ??? TBD
Excel = ??? TBD

I am over generalizing the comparisions but you get the idea. Any bets on what the future VMware acquisitions will be? Perhaps a Word and Excel equivalent? I would also bet that VMware is looking at porting these applications to CloudFoundry and building a future product/brand offering around them, along with requisite management tools.

New NetApp CommVault OEM Relationship

Today NetApp and CommVault announced an OEM relationship whereby CommVault will integrate with NetApp's snapshot technology. The new NetApp SnapProtect product uses CommVault Simpana to add traditional backup and restore capabilities to NetApp's snapshot technologies (SnapManager, SnapMirror, SnapVault). NetApp SnapProtect provides a single management framework for managing NetApp snapshots, SnapMirror, SnapVault and backup schedules. In the past managing NetApp snapshots and host backup required separate processes and tools. Administrators needed to manually keep track of overlap and scheduling between the tools.

The other benefit is driving the traditional backup to tape process off the host or virtual machine to the storage array level, and utilize snapshots. Using SnapProtect, CommVault can restore of individual files, provide data classification and snapshot management through the SnapProtect framework.

Press release: http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news-rel-20110531-291587.html

VMware Cloud Foundry shakes up the PaaS model

With VMware’s release of Cloud Foundry it seems the momentum continues towards PaaS and SaaS. This is backed by the recent Forrester report "Sizing the Cloud" which shows the future revenue largely in SaaS, followed by PaaS. The following graphic depicts where the major vendors are at with their IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings.

What makes VMware’s Cloud Foundry interesting is for those who design and build private clouds. Up to this point anyone building a private internal cloud could only emulate an IaaS offering whereby the applications group could self provision virtual machines equipped with compute resources, an operating system and storage. But this still left the burden of installing and deploying the application layer, and the app itself, on the applications group.

If an organization wanted to offer a PaaS in their private cloud, they were essentially out of luck. In 2010 Microsoft did release an Azure Appliance to allow organizations to build their own internal Azure-based PaaS. However the Azure Appliance is largely targeted at very large service providers.

With the public cloud, picking a PaaS provider meant vendor lock in. Build an app for Azure and forget about moving it to Amazon AWS.

But Cloud Foundry looks to change this. First, companies with private clouds will be able to run the Cloud Foundry PaaS. Theoretically even private clouds build on Hyper-V (rather than VMware vSphere) could run Cloud Foundry. Second, if you build an app and deploy it to Cloud Foundry on the public cloud you aren’t locked in. If you find your vendor isn’t meeting their SLA on a routine basis, simply redeploy the app to Cloud Foundry running in your private cloud or to another public cloud provider running Cloud Foundry.

Looking forward I see a few interesting things happening:

• Most large organizations that are building private clouds and IaaS are not using Hyper–V for server virtualization. They are using VMware vSphere and vCloud (in addition to storage and network virtualization and other components that make up a private cloud). Therefore, my feeling is VMware customers will most likely adopt Cloud Foundry over the Azure Appliance.
• VMware’s decision to open source Cloud Foundry will allow it grow and mature quickly. For example, existing languages such as PHP will be quickly supported. Only Spring for Java applications, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby apps, and Node.js apps are currently supported.
• Cloud Foundry will appeal most to companies not using Microsoft development tools and environments.

While the release of Cloud Foundry may warrant adding it to your organization’s long term enterprise application architecture roadmap few, if any, organizations will entertain bringing it into their private clouds in the near term. The main reason for this is most organizations are still in the process of building out their private clouds and getting a handle on all the orchestration and management tools needed to deliver it and chargeback models needed to economically support it.