Ronda Churchill/Bloomberg News
Paul Maritz, VMware’s chief executive.
Or so hopes VMware, which on Monday announced a series of products for computer server and data storage infrastructure and management, backed up by its engineers and consultants. They are designed to give any business the kind of powerful computing and design flexibility currently offered on a rental basis by the so-called “public clouds” of computers run by Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft’s Windows Azure.
“Corporate data centers will look like those big public clouds,” said Paul Maritz, VMware’s chief executive. “We’re trying to pool all the technology, including server virtualization, management, a user portal and, increasingly, storage and networking, which you need to build your own cloud.”
And, he might hope, more computer virtualization software made by VMware, and data storage from EMC, which owns a majority stake in VMware.
VMware was a pioneer in server virtualization, which is software that enables one operating system to take on the work of many, including other operating systems, by maximizing the amount of work that one machine can do. Virtualization is considered critical in the development of cloud computing over the past decade. Since VMware’s founding, however, other types of virtualization have emerged.
Mr. Maritz argued that VMware, if viewed collectively through what its clients are doing, is already inside the world’s second- or third-largest cloud infrastructures. “Google has 1.5 million servers, but mostly they are doing one thing,” which is conducting Web searches and placing ads on the results, he said. “Amazon has the biggest public offering. We have an ecosystem of over 1,000 service providers using VMware products, including Rackspace and the New York Stock Exchange.” The Google cloud and Azure, while not big yet, “will be contenders,” he said.
Hedging the company’s bets, last month VMware agreed to pay a stunning $1.26 billion for Nicira, a kind of computer networking virtualization start-up that had next to no revenues. The Nicira product, which will figure in VMware’s cloud-in-a-box offering, will be compatible with the virtualization products inside competing cloud offerings. That means VMware’s cloud might easily interoperate with Amazon or others, so people can put computing resources wherever seems most effective for the task.
Figuring out just how that works will not be Mr. Maritz’s job. Last month he announced he would be stepping down, and on Sept. 1 will be replaced by Pat Gelsinger, who was EMC’s president of information infrastructure products, which means he oversaw a lot of the company’s software and open-source efforts.
Speaking in an interview alongside Mr. Martiz, Mr. Gelsinger said it was likely that corporations would still use public clouds to test different methods of computing, “but they will deploy in private.” He added: “We won’t be the only purveyors of cloud-in-a-box either. Microsoft will do it, so will Openstack,” which is an open source project for cloud computing. “We will work across a multicloud world.”
While the cloud-in-a-box is aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses, Nicira will also help VMware approach big telecommunications providers where it hasn’t had much presence. Mr. Maritz said his purchase price was precisely arrived at by “figuring what it would take to do the deal. That number will be written on our tombstones, one way or another.”
That makes it somewhat like VMware itself. Many people thought EMC paid too much when it picked up the company for $625 million in 2004. After a public offering that left EMC with an 80 percent stake, VMware has a market capitalization of $39 billion.
The announcement was made at the start of VMWorld, the company’s annual show for software developers. Attendance was expected to be about 20,000. Mr. Maritz described the event as “a geekfest, with the worst-dressed individuals in the world.”
“We love them,” he added. “We want them to leave ready to go whole-hog, from working on server virtualization to creating their own miniclouds.”