VMware is changing its flavor. Image: osde8info/Flickr
VMware has named Pat Gelsinger as its new CEO, moving the industry veteran from parent company EMC, where he served as president and chief operating officer, Wired Enterprise reported late on Tuesday. Earlier in the day, the news leaked out about the company being “on the verge of a major shakeup that will see the company replace CEO Paul Maritz and spin-off Cloud Foundry, its highly-regarded open source cloud-building platform…”
Wired Enterprise‘s Caleb Garling continues in his report:
On Monday, trade publication CRN reported that VMware CEO Paul Maritz will be replaced by Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel bigwig who is now president and chief operating officer of storage giant EMC, VMare’s parent company.
The news came just hours after Gigaom reported that VMware is spinning off Cloud Foundry into a new company that wil also oversee Project Rubicon — a joint venture between VMware and EMC that seeks to build another type of cloud builder — and the EMC data analytics outfit Greenplum.
…It’s also unclear how the rumored CEO change is related to Gigaom‘s report that EMC and VMware are spinning off a new cloud company. Citing sources close to the deal, Gigaom reported that the spinoff — which is not yet finalized — would help VMware compete with cloud services offered by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
The bottom line, as Garling writes: VMware’s vSphere’s market share as high as 80 percent, but it is not used by the big cloud players. “Amazon, for instance, uses the open source Xen hypervisor, while Google’s new infrastructure cloud, Google Compute Engine, uses the open source KVM software. Clearly, VMware wanted to stake a claim to the burgeoning cloud market — and apparently, it’s willing to make some major changes to get there.”
VMware’s new CEO, Gelsinger, said Tuesday that VMware would fight more aggressively to provide businesses with tools for managing and automating the use of virtualized servers. Presumably, this includes a big push into virtual networks. Just as virtual servers are servers that exist only as software, virtual networks are networks built with software. The aim to make networks easier to setup and modify — to make them as programmable in the way that servers are programmable, Wired Enterprise reported.
But as Peter Ulander wrote for Cloudline recently in “Top 5 Things The Cloud Is Not“:
2. Cloud is not server virtualization. Despite what many believe, and what many will tell you, the cloud is not the same as next-gen server virtualization. It doesn’t surprise me that many believe that by virtualizing their data center they will create a private cloud. Some vendors are intentionally trying to blur that line, aiming to convince customers that their vCenter clusters somehow deliver a private cloud. On the contrary, that is a gross exaggeration of the term cloud.
So what’s going on? Is this all hype or is VMware embracing the cloud in a big way going forrward?