I read an article today asking, “Will VMware survive a post-virtualization world“? This is a very interesting question since the industry is an an intersection moving from an era of Client-server and virtualized x86 traditional applications to the Big Data era with new applications and new workloads built for cloud, social, and mobile. EMC categorizes these two different eras as Platform 2 and Platform 3.
I believe VMware knows that virtualization is old news and are moving to “the next big thing”. From providing support for Docker to integrated solutions with OpenStack. Virtualization is not going anywhere but there are new solutions that have been born from the Open Source world who are coming to eat some of VMware’s Lunch. Instead of fighting this wave of change VMware has embraced it and made it part of their solution stacks.
One of the motto’s of the EMC Federation of Companies is that if you don’t disrupt yourself then someone else will come along and do it for you. It’s better to ride the wave of change then to try to hold back the water. Now this is harder to do for larger companies but not impossible. It will just take some more time.
It will be very interesting to see how VMware can adapt to the new change in the industry when they are used to making the changes themselves.