Five Reflections from VMworld with Ovum's Tim Stammers

 Last week marked the annual pilgrimmage for many to San Franciso's Moscone Center to attend VMware's VMworld Conference The Conference is quickly becoming "the" conference in IT and is widely regarded as the pre-eminent virtualizationfocused conference in the industry.  I had a chance to catch up quickly with Ovum Senior Analyst Tim Stammers who was one of many roaming the halls at the conference.

Tim, VMworld is quickly becoming “the” IT/Technology Conference to be at, why do you think that is?  Do the other Virtualization focused and user conferences you attend draw that same level of interest?

(Tim): There were 17,000 people at the show and VMware said they expected 14,000. VMware still has the biggest installed base compared to any other x64 virtualization platform, and we shouldn’t be surprised that VMworld attendance is still growing. Not only are we still in the adoption phase for virtualization, but people are moving on from consolidation to more sophisticated usage.

What impressed you the most about the conference?

(Tim) Easily it was the director software and VMware's new public cloud services program based on that software.  The director software will be the bridge between private and public clouds, and buy providing portability between public clouds, the program will deal with the cloud lock-in issue.  The security and SLA problems are still there, but one out of three is progress.

There was a fair amount of discussion that without storage there is no virtualization. Were you having flashbacks to earlier days when your primary focus was on storage technologies and trends?

(Tim) Without storage there’s nothing. The difference between server virtualization and storage virtualization is that IT people have been buying into server virtualization much faster than they ever did for storage virtualization.

Are we any further along with virtual desktops then we were based on your report earlier this year?  If so, why? If not, what’s the hold up do you think?

(Tim) The concept is great, but the choice of architectures for virtual desktops is confusing and the costs of doing it are not clear. It is also very difficult to establish the baseline cost of carrying on with traditional PC deployments. I think desktop virtualization will be taken up, but not as quickly as the vendors and some analysts expect.

When can we start seeing you in social media circles? Blogging and on Twitter?

(Tim): Oh God.

Disclaimer:  Ovum is not a client of Lois Paul & Partners.  Tim and I have shared many interesting conversations in the past around storage, virtualization and green technologies and continue to do so.